— Jessie Tarbox Beals

By Ralmon Jon Black, Williamsburg Historical Society

Jessie Tarbox Beals

There were, among the many of proud stature, more than a few whose pursuits were precocious and ponderings provocative.  To recall only one is not to pass judgment, but to select from the many.  From her brief window in Williamsburg she soon sprang, to elbow her way into the man’s world—national news photographer, the remarkable Jessie Tarbox Beals.

Jessie was invited to Williamsburg to teach at the Mountain Street District School, a one-room school house with seven pupils, but that was only a stepping stone in the river of her life before she made the leap to be the first and one of the foremost women journalistic photographers in this country.

Her brother, Paul W. Tarbox, older by 14 years, arrived in Williamsburg around 1880 and managed Kinney’s Store, as the Williamsburg General Store was known when first built by Salmon Kingsley Wait.  Paul knew there was a teaching position in the offing and urged Jessie to apply for it.  She was barely seventeen in 1887, when, she received a Certificate to teach.  Her Principal had recommend her “…has given evidence of possessing the qualities of a first class teacher …my acquaintance with her warrants the conclusion that she will prove herself a painstaking, faithful and successful teacher.”  Paul wrote her to build her confidence, “I saw the chairman of the School Committee and he was pleased . . . Regarding the ages of the pupils—they are 9 to 12, and they don’t know much.  It won’t be very hard to teach them—you’ll have no trouble on that score.”

She came from Hamilton, Ontario in 1888 and taught in the Mountain Street School she described as, “…five miles from the Center…“a one-room, rundown little wooden structure with chipped and scarred walls showing years of neglect…containing a desk, a blackboard, a pot-bellied stove and a few benches…[my] back to the woodshed, facing seven scholars of assorted ages, each one requiring individual instruction.”  She was salaried at seven dollars a week and room and board was plain farm food and accommodations lacking privacy, even sometimes sharing a bed with one of the girls in her class.  Quite a big change for her, as Jessie’s early childhood had been a lavish one in a Victorian mansion with dinner parties and entertainments such as were common to the Skinners and Haydens of the same era before the Mill River Disaster.

That first year Jessie became interested in photography when she won a contest—the prize a camera—a small black box, die-cut from a sheet of tin, folded and soldered. It used a photographic plate 2½” x 4” to be loaded in the dark through a narrow slot which closed with a slide. It was only a sunlight camera with a very slow single convex lens.  With the prize came a box of six plates, a package of photo paper, two small developing trays, a light tripod and a few tubes of chemicals. The camera, a simple contraption, was reminiscent of the sixteenth century camera obscura, and though she did produce pictures, they were not very sharp images.

Jessie immediately employed this little toy for the amusement of her students. It wasn’t long before the bare walls of the little district schoolhouse came alive with small portraits of children and pictures of the schoolhouse and its surroundings. She would later write of her first camera: “I learned to love to use it. I soon found that it was a wonderfully satisfying way of recording impressions. Of course, at first they were not so subtly accurate as I would have liked, but at least they aroused the association and reminiscence that I connected with each scene.”  Saving up twelve dollars—nearly two weeks salary—she splurged on a better tool, a roll-film, folding Kodak with much better features.  Then she was able to exercise and refine her gift for composition, producing pictures equal to those with much more experience. Photography became an outlet of her creativity, a divergence from the mundane routine of teaching.

When she came to teach at the Center School, now the Grange Hall, she located with her mother at 10 Petticoat Hill.  The house at the foot of the hill across from the entrance to the Petticoat Hill Reservation.  The Reservation was then a very popular picnic spot, especially favored by Smith College students, coming out to Burgy on the street car.  During the summer vacation she hit upon the idea that her hobby could earn money. Converting a closet into a darkroom, and now using even a larger 4” x 5” view camera with a ground glass focal screen and individual holders, she established Williamsburg’s first photography studio on the front lawn of the house.

To promote her venture, she cut out foot-high letters spelling “Photographs” and strung them across the porch. She tacked some of her best pictures to the wall and handed out business cards reading, “Jessie R. Tarbox—Photographer.” When business was slow she went out to find customers for portraits.  She found clientele for family group poses, houses, barns, even horse-and-buggy shots.  She was amazed that she could earn more with her camera that summer than she could as a schoolmarm.  The following summer she found the market even more rewarding.  On weekends when the Smith College girls hiked up to the Reservation for the grand view afforded there, as it were before it all grew up, Jessie was always there with her camera.

She enjoyed the local social doings and became a leader among the younger set taking part in amateur theatricals, attending local concerts, dances and occasional hayrides.  These activities brought her into contact with the renowned social reformer, Fannie Clary, and she and her mother to Fannie’s whist table.  Fanny was a temperance advocate and suffragist and Jessie seems to have taken a page from her book.

Jessie read avidly and researched the science of photography and constantly experimenting with different techniques and chemicals.  She went on trips to discover the world and the lives of other people. In the summer of 1893, before she moving to Greenfield, she had taken the long train ride to Chicago to attend the Columbian Exposition. There she reserved a room for a twenty-five-day-stay in the women’s dormitory. Since large cameras requiring a tripod were forbidden, she utilized her miniature Kodak, obtained a permit for it, and developed her film in the darkroom provided in the photography department. She returned home consumed with the desire to visit the foreign places whose mockup villages she had seen and photographed at the exposition. She was no stranger to the diversified customs and cultures of the world’s peoples. Once, after a visit to New York City, she remarked that the most interesting part of her trip was to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where she saw miles of exhibits recording thousands of years of human change and development.

Jessie left Burgy to teach in Greenfield in 1893.  The Chautauqua Assembly and Adult Educational Institute giving summer courses in the arts, sciences and humanities, with its atmosphere of a revival meeting combined with that of a country fair, attracted large audiences. Jessie got so involved in taking pictures that there was no time left for the lectures. She was a familiar figure on the grounds, with her winning personality and her pert, “Now look pleasant, please.” Her ability to process and deliver the pictures in record time partly accounted for her popularity. But really, it was her own insatiable curiosity, goading her on to see the results as quickly as possible.

In Greenfield, a new interest blossomed. She began dating a young man named Alfred T. Beals. Though he had majored in agriculture at Mass Agricultural College in Amherst, he had wound up as a factory machinist in Greenfield. By the winter of 1896 he and Jessie were a steady couple and they were married that summer when Alfred moved in with her.

Marriage brought on the desire to give up teaching. “My teaching,” she wrote later, “was genteel and sheltered, but monotonous and moneyless work, having neither height nor depth.”  This growing dissatisfaction was then also compounded by the discriminatory practice of the school system, effectually disallowing women from teaching if they were to have children.  Any woman who left the teaching system to have a child could not return unless a widow or until abandoned by her husband for at least three years. Jessie soon resigned.

She and Alfred traveled extensively for a dozen years.  In 1905 they located in New York City, where they set up a studio together.  Jessie focused on city scenes, was commissioned for portraits of artists, writers, and actors, and became part of the Greenwich Village bohemian culture.  She continued to travel to other cities, both on assignment, and free lance.  Jessie was very clever at finding new ways of marketing her skills, and finding new innovations to follow up on. Shortly after their arrival in New York, she began to travel outside the city to photograph military trainees, rifle meets, and other goings-on. Her “ability to hustle” and sharp instinct of just what was newsworthy, paid off, as did the fact that she was a woman.  One time during a grand parade she had the audacity to command a colonel to halt his regiment for a take—he ordered the halt and she got the take!

Their marriage became strained; Alfred spent more time on his lifelong interest in botany and less assisting Jessie on her junkets.  In 1911 a daughter, Nanette, was born to Jessie, ostensibly fathered by another man.  Jessie and Alfred separated in 1917 and finally divorced in 1923.  Sickly as a child, Nanette spent time in hospitals and country boarding schools, later as a teenager she worked as an assistant to her mother.

Jessie occasioned to express herself in verse.  These sample lines came from her somber pen:

 

 

I close my eyes, lest
He should see the hate
That burns beneath their lids
And then I wait and wait, until
He leaves my side.
Intense you say: yes I am intense
A pessimist deep, brooding over life—
A woman with strong feelings,
Proud instincts and heart sorrows
With hope of little joy, save that of work,
With longings for sweet tenderness—
A home, a comrade and deep sympathy…

 

In the extensive travel, which her calling offered, she was to encounter such people as Sir Thomas Lipton, John Burroughs and Mark Twain.  She went on a junket with President Roosevelt to a reunion of his Rough Riders in Texas.  And she accompanied President Taft, as photographer, on his trip to the Philippines.

As she aged, and as it became harder for her to find adequate work, Jessie moved frequently, usually accompanied by Nanette. She went to Santa Barbara and Hollywood, California, in 1928, to Chicago, Illinois, in 1933, and then back to New York City, where she died in 1942. Her later work was often published in Vogue, Town and Country, Ladies’ Home Journal, Country Life in America, and Harper’s Bazaar; during her career she photographed a broad range of subjects including portraits, immigrant city dwellers, cityscapes, and houses and gardens.

SOURCES:
The above biographical information was adapted from Town Records, remembrances and various other sources with heaviest reliance on the book of her life and her photographic work, Jessie Tarbox Beals, First Woman News Photographer, by Alexander Alland, Sr., New York: Camera Graphic Press, 1978.  The images also are from this book, the concerted effort of her daughter, Nanette Tarbox Beals.  Copies can be found in the Historical Society collection, Meekins Library in Williamsburg and Forbes Library in Northampton.

More about the Papers and photographs of Jessie Tarbox Beals, 1866-1989, in the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America at Harvard University Library can be found on line at:  http://oasis.lib.harvard.edu/oasis/deliver/~sch00048