Photographs and Negatives, 1920 - 1936

Series III contains nearly three hundred glass plate negatives that Earl Emmons made during his lifetime and are arranged in two groups reflecting the distinctly different subjects covered. The first is a group of images taken at Deepdene, Frederic and Bertha Goudy’s home and workshop in Marlborough-on-Hudson, New York. Emmons documented Goudy at work designing a typeface, illustrating every step in the creative process; the two collaborated on the content and were intending to publish a comprehensive pictorial history of Goudy’s work. A selection of images was published in the June 1934 issue of the journal Printing, and when Goudy’s workshop was destroyed by fire in January 1939, Emmons’s photographs grew in importance. The second subseries has negatives working for the United States Forest Service in the Black Hills National Forest in southwestern South Dakota in 1920 and 1921. Images include pack horses climbing up a mountain, four views of the second Harney Peak lookout tower where Emmons was stationed, and an image of Emmons inside the tower using an Osborne Fire Finder, or alidade, to look for smoke. The lookout tower was at 7,200 feet and had views to four states. Also present are more general images of Black Hills landscapes including, views of a Sylvan Lake, Friendship Tower on Mount Roosevelt, Devils Tower, and the Needles, as well the Horace Ross monument in Custer City. Emmons copied a number of historic images such as portraits of Jack Crawford, Wild Bill Hickok, Seth Bullock, Calamity Jane, and their graves and memorials. Several of the South Dakota history negatives were titled within the image in ink by Emmons, who included his distinctive monogram of an H with elongated serifs and crossbar, suggesting that he might have intended to market them.