The Poors of 19th-century Andover -- descendants of a town founder, Daniel Poor (1656-1735) -- were a family of wainwrights. Their patriarch, William Poor (1805-1898), established a wagon-making business at the southwest corner of what became known as Poor Street when he was still in his twenties, in 1833. With his sons Joseph and Jonathan working alongside him, he eventually added a blacksmith's shop, lumber house, and wheelwright operation. But William's obituary in the Andover Townsman refers pristinely to his first calling only, praising him as “an honest builder of honest wagons." The obit also obliquely praised his efforts during the Civil War. “He was an enthusiastic American citizen," it says, "the kind that lifts the hat to the stars and stripes, and gives of blood and fortune to keep the union.”
    Early on, the Poors were ardent abolitionists, so much so that in 1846 they left their place of worship and helped start another church in Andover, because they didn't want to pray alongside anyone who wasn't anti-slavery. As for William's, Joseph's, or Jonathan's participation in the Underground Railroad, I found mentions only in secondary-source materials -- unsurprisingly, given the clandestine nature of the operation. To cite some of the most recent ones: a 2011 report published by the historian of the church abandoned by the Poors declares that the family "built wagons with false bottoms and ran a stop on the Underground Railway through Frye Village  [former name of my neighborhood, now known as Shawsheen] for years.” A book titled Andover Stories, published in 2011 jointly by my local historical society and the Townsman, similarly states: “In false-bottomed wagons made in [the Poor family’s] shops, escaping slaves could safely be concealed for transport under a load of produce or hay.” Likewise, an early photograph in the historical society's collection showing the Poor compound of shops bears a contemporary caption that claims William “built wagons with hidden compartments to help smuggle slaves to freedom.” And a circa 1895 photo of William himself, looking quite elderly just a few years before his death, was captioned by the society this way: "Poor started a successful wagon shop in 1883 [sic]. His shop was also used as an Underground Railroad stop. It is estimated that several hundred slaves stopped at his shop.” That glaringly wrong date, nearly two decades after the Civil War ended, gave me pause. What else did the historical society have wrong? That "several hundred" people had been sent on their way to freedom in Canada seemed a phenomenal, too phenomenal, number. I was, nonetheless, still hoping to be convinced that the Poors truly were my local heroes, and pressed on.
    In 1999, when Juliet Haines Mofford gave the historical society's Annual Memorial Lecture, her topic was "The Underground Railway: Andover & the Anti-Slavery Movement."  When I saw the typed transcript at the historical society recently, I recalled that I had been a lecture attendee. The transcript shows that Mrs. Mofford, a prodigious researcher and writer, merely suggested what others later repeated as fact.* The Poor wagons would have been "... handy for smuggling slaves...," she opined. It would have been "easy to hide them under a load of produce...," she speculated, and "easy for someone with William Poor's skills to build wagons with false bottoms..." As for her sources, among them was Wilbur H. Siebert's The Underground Railroad in Massachusetts, published by the American Antiquarian Society in 1936.  Quoting the Ohio State University history professor, Mrs. Mofford said, "'When [William] Poor heard a gentle rap on his door or other subdued sounds in the night,' he dressed quickly, went out, harnessed his mare Nellie to a covered wagon and started with his dusky passengers, probably for North Salem, New Hampshire.'”
      Professor Siebert named Joseph Poor as being among others in Andover who "could be counted on to speed the black wayfarers on their journey." Mrs. Mofford repeated his words. But Professor Siebert, born in 1866, could not have been a witness to what he described. So where did he get his information? A footnote credits a letter written to him on November 25, 1934, by a Miss Marion La Mere; an undated letter written to her by a Reverend William C. [sic] Poor; and a book, History of Lawrence, Mass., published in 1924 by Maurice B. Dorgan. Via the Internet, I learned that,  like Professor Siebert, neither of them could have been eyewitnesses. Miss La Mere, a lodger at an Andover address, was born circa 1889, Mr. Dorgan in 1880.  So it would seem the reverend -- i.e., William George Poor (1858-1939), son of Joseph -- would have had the most reliable information. As it happened, the retired Congregationalist minister, a graduate of Dartmouth College and Yale Divinity School, spoke about his recollections of the Underground Railroad in Andover to a local woman's club on December 5, 1932, and the Townsman published an account of it.

To be continued.

*There is even a repetition of this idea on a National Park Service's website that is devoted to the Underground Railroad in Essex County, Massachusetts (https://www.nps.gov/sama/learn/historyculture/upload/UGRRsm.pdf): "Frye Village was the location of Elijah Hussey’s sawmill, the ink factory of William C. Donald, and the flourishing wagon factory of William Poor and his sons, where wagons were built with false bottoms in order to secretly transport slaves." Credit is given to "Julie Moffitt [sic], Andover Historical Society."



    

     When Paul Theroux reviewed my book Huddle Fever in the New York Times, he ended it with this curmudgeonly, Therouxesque suggestion: "Perhaps Ms. Schinto will write a similar book about smug little Andover." I had revealed in the final chapter that after ten years of living in the old, bereft, textile-mill city of Lawrence, Massachusetts, I had moved to Andover, the well-appointed, colonial-era, prep-school town next door. That my husband and I had ended our days in the so-called Immigrant City in, as Mr. Theroux put it, "disappointment, confusion, alarm and flight" was truer than I liked to admit. I was more than happy to leave the police sirens, fire engines, and car alarms behind, and I rather liked the quiet peace of Andover. Did that then make me smug, too? Undeniably, I felt smug on my daily walk past 66 Poor Street, the circa 1830 Joseph Poor farmhouse, known as a stop on the Underground Railroad -- as if the mere act of buying property a block away from a structure involved in such a noble cause meant that I had done something commendable. It was only after the election of Donald J. Trump deepened our already-calamitous cultural and political divides that I began to own up to the error of my irrational wishful-thinking ways. Smug was not what I wanted or needed to be about anything. I thought about Joseph Poor. In a similarly divided time he had made a difference. How could I make one, too? I knew I was not capable of an act even remotely as courageous as his. I was a writer, not a saint. But, I decided, making his example more widely known might be useful, even inspirational to someone better qualified than myself for potential canonization. And so I made an appointment at my local historical society, where I hoped good information about my neighborhood hero could be found.

To be continued.

     I have lived at 53 Poor Street in Andover, Massachusetts. for the past nearly twenty-five years. In 1994, when I told my mother the address of the house that my husband and I had just bought, she wondered aloud and half seriously if I might be able to get the name changed. In her case, it wasn't as outlandish an idea as it might otherwise seem. For two decades my father had been the chief building inspector of the Connecticut town where I grew up. Mother had habitually heard about shenanigans at the middle-management level, enabling perhaps equally improbable sleights of a bureaucratic hand. But I had no problem at all with my new street's name. In fact, I quickly came to enjoy telling strangers on the phone, who had misunderstood me, "P-o-o-r. Like 'not rich.' No money." Together we could relate to that concept, or at least contemplate it for a moment of instant rapport. One guffawed and retorted, "That's worse than Third Place." Those familiar with Andover's reputation for affluence would often express double amusement. To them, I would say, "It's not where the poor farm was, and Andover did used to have one. It's somebody's name."

To be continued.

       I brought no real knowledge to the press preview of "Della Robbia: Sculpting with Color in Renaissance Florence," on view at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, through December 4th. But what certainly helped was my Catholic school education of long ago. I have often found it handy when looking at artworks from the Renaissance. It supplies the necessary narratives that go along with the virtuoso depictions in paint, marble, or, in this case, glazed terra cotta.  And so I confess in my best, lapsed fashion: the Sisters of Mercy are the reason I quickly called to mind the story of The Visitation, unequivocal centerpiece of the 46 sculptures by the Della Robbia family and associated workshops that have been gathered here for this first-of-its-kind exhibition in the United States.
         Designed and created by Luca della Robbia circa 1445, The Visitation depicts a so-called mystery of faith. It is the visit of Mary, pregnant with Christ, to the household of her cousin Elizabeth, who at an advanced age, is herself pregnant -- with St. John the Baptist. As the story goes, upon the sight of Mary, Elizabeth felt a leap in her womb as the unborn John acknowledged the presence of the Son of God.
        The Visitation usually resides in the Church of San Giovanni Fuorcivitas in Pistoia. Like the virgin birth, the elderly Elizabeth's pregnancy, and the fetus John's awareness, it's something of a miracle that Italy has allowed this piece, along with five others, to travel here or anywhere, in the first place. It's miraculous, too, that the colors of the glazes have not faded in more than five centuries. That's because of Luca's invention, a recipe that called for percentages of tin and lead much higher than were used for glazes that have not held up.
            Interestingly, Luca chose an ethereal, creamy, monochrome white for the nearly life-size Visitation. It seems exactly right for depicting the moment shared by these two holy women. But nothing except polychrome would have sufficed for the monumental Resurrection of Christ, designed and created by Luca's nephew Giovanni della Robbia circa 1520. Bunches of plump purple grapes are prominent among the shiny green garlands and rough-skinned, oversize lemons that frame the massive (11-foot long) lunette of the risen Jesus. It was commissioned by a member of the winemaking Antinori family for the entrance of a country house outside Florence. Constructed of 46 separate parts held together only with friction, no pins or adhesives, the tableau features angels in flowing azure blue dresses as well as a saintly figure, hands clasped in prayer, identified as a mere mortal, an Antinori marchese.
            A representative of the family's 26th generation, the charming Alessia Antinori (b. 1975), was a guest at the preview. "I always say that wine and art are related, because wine is art," Ms. Antinori said. Her ancestors sold the piece in the late 19th century to a grand-touring New Yorker, A. Augustus Healy, who donated it in 1898 to the Brooklyn Institute, now the Brooklyn Museum. The present-day Antinoris helped pay for the conservation of the relief for this exhibition.
           This type of art was produced and in high demand from about 1430-1440 to 1550, said Dr. Marietta Cambareri, the show's curator, as she called our attention to the lifelike quality of the portraits, particularly the children and adolescents. In their day, they were often described as "almost seeming to breathe," she told us. I found that quality very much apparent and uncanny in Bust of a Young Boy, the work of Andrea della Robbia circa 1475. On loan from the Museo Nazionale del Bargello in Florence, it must have taken as its model a simple Italian ragazzi. His parted lips, the curls on his forehand, and his eyes that look away in temporary innocence comprise an expression of another kind of miracle, the secular mystery of human life itself.
           This show travels to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., after its Boston run. Highly recommended to my fellow Bostonians.

​

There was one paragraph in Gerald Marzorati's interesting book Late to the Ball that was worth the price of it. The paragraph contained the excellent phrase "the healthy aloneness of singles tennis." Marzorati sees in it affinities with reading, which is what he calls his "life pursuit." Being that he was an editor at the New York Times Magazine, Harper's, and The New Yorker,  he has done a special kind of reading. As a writer, he has done the same. And so have I. So that explains to me, at least in part, why I have pursued tennis, specifically singles, and why it has meshed so well with my own "life pursuit," and conversely why I have always felt uncomfortable playing doubles. Even when (on those rare occasions) I am having fun at doubles, I don't get out of it what I get out of singles. And I would not have pursued tennis so relentlessly if doubles was all that I had played.

As for the rest of the book, it was a good idea well executed, but in the end, a disappointment for not going very deep. Maybe it should have been just a long magazine article, like the kind he helped other writers develop all those many years. Still, as I said in my opening, it was an interesting book, and will go on my bookshelf along with many other titles on the subject of tennis, including favorites like John McPhee's Levels of the Game, Andre Agassi's Open, and even Brad Gilbert's Winning Ugly. As it happens, what started it all for me in this sport was a book, Timothy Gallwey's The Inner Game of Tennis,​ which I initially read to help me with my writing. This was in the late 1970s, long before I had picked up a racquet with any serious ambition. Recommended to me by a pianist friend, Haskell "Hal" Small, to whom it had been recommended by an opera-singer friend of his, it turned out to be one of the most important books I have ever read -- on any subject. To this day, I return to it for inspiration both on and off the court.

On its face, Antique Photographica is a book of illustrated essays that could be considered a series of mini-tutorials on collecting various types of photographic images, cameras, and other hardware used to create those images. The tutors have been well chosen. They are some of the most respected experts in the field, and each writes with passion and knowledge. What is more, accompanying their words are choice items from their own collections of daguerreotypes, ambrotypes, tintypes, cartes-de-visite, or whatever their chosen specialty may be. That’s a superficial description of this volume, anyway. What underlies this book’s excellent writing and superb imagery is as good a proselytizing tool for new collectors of antique photography and photographica as one is apt to get.
​
“Where are the young people?” We often hear that plaintive cry when an antique-show or auction is mostly populated, as it usually is, with representatives of the older demographic groups. Well, I have a good idea of where the younger ones are. They’re at South By Southwest , the annual music, film, and interactive conference and festival held in Austin, Texas.  They’re at TED conferences, where “Technology, Entertainment, and Design” converge. They’re at Comic-Con in San Diego. They’re definitely at hacker conventions, one of which, ToorCon,  I attended as a reporter for another paper and where I interviewed its then 17-year-old white-hat hacker cofounder and many of his highly intelligent colleagues. (See "H is for Hacker.")

I bring this up, because if there’s any hope of attracting more than a trickle of new collectors to the delights of old things, I believe one way is through the portals of antique science and technology, especially antique photography. Where else are the young people? Wherever they may be, surely you have noticed, they’re creating images -- photographs -- billions of them, with their phones and other devices. Don’t you think some might be just a little bit curious about the imagery and image-making processes of the past? It’s my opinion that many more of them, if given the choice, would display a far greater interest in those things than in, say, the carving of an acanthus leaf on the knee of a cabriole leg.
​
The leadoff essayists in this well produced volume are Jack and Beverly Wilgus, who collect camera obscuras and objects and images associated with camera obscuras -- i.e., the optical devices that take advantage of a phenomenon of nature in order to project an upside-down image of reality on a wall, screen, or smaller surface. These self-styled “guardians and champions” of the camera obscura’s history have also become “designers and builders” of several box camera obscuras and a small tent camera obscura that they call “The Magic Mirror of Life.”  What is more, they collect “camera obscura experiences,” traveling around the country and the world to visit other working examples. How fun is that? Who wouldn’t want to join them? It’s one of my beliefs that young people are adept at collecting intangible things, like experiences. What if they were introduced to yet another kind?

Like the Wilguses, Ralph and Bobbie London are a collecting couple, but in the Londons’ case, each has contributed a separate chapter. The beauty of wood and brass is on display in the images of Ralph’s 19th-century American camera collection. There are, for example, a circa 1845 quarter-plate daguerreotype camera labeled “John Roberts, Boston” and circa 1890 full-plate daguerreotype Star View camera in mahogany.  He hasn’t stopped there, however. This collecting area has allowed him to hunt for the more elusive posing chairs, head clamps, and photographic-chemical bottles, along with such things as “brass birdies,” used to keep children of earlier generations occupied while they were having their pictures taken. Ralph describes how one from his collection works: “Partially filling the base of the device with water and squeezing the bulb on the tube makes the bird sing while moving its mouth and tail.”

Bobbi’s chapter is on Stanhopes, also called “peeps,” which are microscopic image-viewing devices. As Bobbi writes, the term is “used to refer both to the combination lens-image unit and to the items into which they were placed.” My use of the term “microscopic” is not hyperbolical: the images are less than 1/30 of an inch square. (The diameter of a typical eye’s pupil is 1/6 of an inch.) As for the lenses, they are small enough to fit into an array of objects, large and small, that only imagination has limited. Developed by René Prudent Patrice Dagron (1819-1900) of France, the novelties were popular from the late 19th century into the 20th. They are the namesake of the lens’s inventor, Britain’s Charles Stanhope (1753-1816). The illustrations from Bobbi’s collection include Stanhope jewelry, letter openers, pipes, pencils, knitting-needle nibs, scent bottles, watch fobs, rosary beads, and children’s items, one of which is a miniature potty seat carved of bone. Humor and whimsy these Stanhope creators certainly had.

Leonard A. Walle’s chapter on American ambrotypes offers nearly 20 pages of rich visuals and commentary on the so-called “daguerreotypes on glass,” whose period of popularity was a veritable sliver of time, 1857-1858. “Hunter with His Dog” shows a contemplative man posed with his gun, game bag, traps, and long-eared canine seated obediently beside him against a painted backdrop. “Franklin Hose Co. No 5 Utica NY” presents a group portrait of ten uniformed firefighters along with tools of their trade, including the company’s hose nozzle, two trumpets, an oil torch, and hose wrenches. One of the group looks like a kid. He was indeed “torch boy” James McNall, named, as are all of them, courtesy of the Utica Tribune. Ambrotypes, which made use of the wet-collodion process, were cheaper to produce than daguerreotypes, which are silver-plated copper. But soon enough ambrotypes were overtaken by an even cheaper process, tintypes.

Tintypes are the subject of Janice G. Schimmelmann, who literally has written the book, i.e., The Tintype in America, 1856-1880.  “Because of the tintype portrait, we have a visual record of post-1860 America -- vivid and direct,” she writes in her essay here. “Three Women Weeping” depicts mourners with what looks like a painted portrait of a man in their hands -- a deceased father or brother, Schimmelmann speculates. Their white handkerchiefs hide their faces. The young man pictured in “How Not to Be Seen” hides his face for a different reason and in a different way, with his hat tipped down over his eyes, as if he were napping standing up. Is he being funny or coy? “His battered hat, folded arms, and five-pointed star on his shirt only add to the mystery,” observes Schimmelmann, who has chosen these tintypes’ titles -- a creative act, as is the act of collecting. As she notes, “To add a tintype to my collection is a careful aesthetic choice.”

Other experts who share their collections in these pages include Greg French (daguerreotypes of outdoor scenes), Sabine Ocker (cyanotypes), Thomas Harris (cartes de visite), and Kenneth H. Rosen (early American stereoviews). Those unfamiliar with the depth and breadth of antique images will be amazed at what the photographic record shows.

French’s image of a shipbuilding scene includes a bed sheet hanging out a window. “So much for perfection, and yet it is perfect,” declares French, since the detail brings such an undeniably human moment literally into the picture. A farm scene of prize bulls is another gem from French, a collector-dealer, who has an instructive section on his Website, “A Beginner’s Primer: Ten Criteria for Evaluating Daguerreotypes.”  In French’s astute analysis of the scene, the men’s poses demonstrate the power of animals in an agrarian society. In similar group portraits of men from different social classes, he writes, “there is usually a hierarchy where the well-heeled men in the top hats (presumably the owners) segregate themselves from their employees.” In this scene, however, “they are all incidental to the bulls.”

Ocker’s luminous Prussian blue cyanotype images range from a newly hatched chick to a man posing with his Penny Farthing bicycle to a Mount Holyoke chemistry student (class of 1898) in her lab. There is also a wonderful horizontal view of dozens of steamer trunks piled high at the Northampton, Massachusetts, train station. It’s from an album by an unknown member of Smith College’s class of 1905. As an historian of photography, Ocker has uncovered the distinctive role that cyanotypes played in women’s colleges and lives during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. “The availability of cheap cameras and pre-coated papers created an explosion” in documentation by women, who sometimes marketed their images, Ocker writes. That’s what those young people were doing with their spare time.

Rosen’s chapter gives us stereoviews (three-dimensional when seen through a stereoscope) of buildings (Pennsylvania Hospital for the Insane, Philadelphia, 1854), soldiers (Union men at a camp dinner), landscape vistas (Yosemite Falls, 1861, by Carleton Watkins), and celebrities (Mark Twain at his in-laws’ Quarry Farm in Elmira, New York). Young people and others who think 3-D movies are something new -- or, at the earliest, invented in the 1950s -- should be informed of the mid-19th-century technology that made possible these compelling images.

Some of the essayist-collectors share general thoughts about the art of collecting, useful to anyone who is object-obsessed. Most generous with his collecting philosophy is Mike Kessler, whose chapter is about stereoscopes. Kessler moved on to them after cameras and a host of other collecting interests, ordinary (stamps) and extraordinary (ice skates). What tipped the balance in favor of stereoscopes over cameras, he writes, was that “where countless reference books and price guides exist for cameras, the true extent of the field of stereoscopes isn’t fully known and may never be. There’s still the thrill of discovery.”

There’s so much more: magic lanterns and optical toys by Richard Balzer, autochromes by Hugh Tifft and Jeremy Rowe, and European daguerreotype stereoviews by the Ginnses. One from the Ginnses’ collection is a portrait of an unidentified man with a stereoscope and a lens on the table beside him. “For over twenty years, I have tried to ascertain the identification of the sitter,” Bryan Ginns writes. He has speculated that this could be an important person in the optical or photography field. Or “it could be just a creative French daguerreotypist using these instruments as studio props.” Undoubtedly, Bryan, like a true collector, will continue trying to solve the mystery.

All collecting interests needs to be awakened. I’m sure most collectors can recount their own collector “origin story,” i.e., their first encounter with whatever has become the center of their collecting lives. Many of them may wonder what they’d be doing now if not for that introduction. To be realistic, young people probably aren’t going to stumble upon this book. They’ll need to be shown it. However, there are far greater odds that they will serendipitously find antique photography on the Internet.

​As it happens, the Ginnses operate the only online auction in the United States specifically handling the antique imagery and hardware of photography’s first 100 years. There are also numerous Websites on antique photographica that repay time spent with them. With the same phone that the young are using to take selfies, they can, for starters, take a look at Luminous Lint; Michael Pritchard’s British  Photographic History; and the online American Museum of Photography. Once hooked, they’ll be searching for all the information they can find, only a tiny fraction of which is, still at this point, anywhere but between the pages of a book.