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拍品专文
Early photographic accounts of Southern California are scarce, in particular large format albums.
The 46 hand-numbered works in this inscribed album date between circa 1885 and 1892, and chronicle one of the first irrigation projects in the west - the damming of the Santa Ana River in the arid region east of Los Angeles.
The Bear Valley Irrigation Company managed to achieve the impossible, carrying water from the newly built mountain reservoir to the recently incorporated Redlands. Desert land that had hardly supported sheep and cattle would become the "Naval Orange Capital of the World."
The Bear Valley dam project and the development of Redlands was owed to two enterprising young men from the East Coast - Frank Elwood Brown and Edward G. Judson.
Brown was born in West Haven, Connecticut on August 23, 1856. He graduated from Yale as a civil engineer in 1876 and moved to California in April 1877. Judson was from Bridgeport, Connecticut, studied at Amherst, and worked as a stockbroker in New York, before relocating to California. The two formed the firm Judson and Brown in the late 1870s. Brown immediately recognized the agricultural possibilities of the barren valley. The adobe colored soil, the perpetually sunny, dry days and cool nights was a climate perfectly suited for citrus crops.
In November 1881 the two filed a map for Redlands, selling their first plot of land on December 6, 1881. Within two years they contracted to provide water to the town and in July 1883 began construction of the dam at a narrow point at the west end of the Santa Ana River, a journey which took two days by stage and burro.
The album opens with four views of the ashlar rock dam, 52 feet high, which cost a reported $68,000 to build. We can date these first views to pre-1885, since massive, partially submerged dead trees have not yet been cut down. Referring to plate 116:
"This is the view of the Rock Dam a year after it was constructed. This is also the first view of the infamous Big Bear Lake. All of the trees sticking up from the water were cut off at the water line during the first winter when the lake froze over. Circa 1885."
In the plates that follow various men can be seen but are not identified. It is conceivable that the figures are Brown, Judson, Walter C. Butler, or Ammon Platt Kitching. Butler was from New Haven and became assistant engineer with Brown on the dam construction. Financing for the project came from Ammon Platt Kitching; he was appointed general manager for Bear Valley Irrigation Company and may also have posed for the photographer.
The next ten plates seem intent on showing how impassable the wilderness was, but we reach the valley floor and see proof of the impossible. Narrow ditches flowing with fresh water from the Santa Ana River have transformed the wasteland.
"At this writing, Oct 16, 1897...looking eastward, toward the colossal peaks, where ten years ago was an almost unbroken stretch of red soil, we now behold, clear up to the eastern foothills, a continuous succession of magnificent orange groves, divided by broad and beautiful avenues, lined with ornamental trees and varied form and verdure."
Frank Brown inscribed the album to Dr. Paul C. Skiff, another resident of New Haven. Skiff was born in 1827 on Skiff Mountain, and at the age of 16 went to live with his aunt in Warren, Ohio. After earning a medical degree he returned to New Haven and set up practice. He acquired an orange grove in California, presumably from Judson and Brown.
F.H. Maude and Company were landscape photographers in Los Angeles, California.
Titles and images available upon request..
The 46 hand-numbered works in this inscribed album date between circa 1885 and 1892, and chronicle one of the first irrigation projects in the west - the damming of the Santa Ana River in the arid region east of Los Angeles.
The Bear Valley Irrigation Company managed to achieve the impossible, carrying water from the newly built mountain reservoir to the recently incorporated Redlands. Desert land that had hardly supported sheep and cattle would become the "Naval Orange Capital of the World."
The Bear Valley dam project and the development of Redlands was owed to two enterprising young men from the East Coast - Frank Elwood Brown and Edward G. Judson.
Brown was born in West Haven, Connecticut on August 23, 1856. He graduated from Yale as a civil engineer in 1876 and moved to California in April 1877. Judson was from Bridgeport, Connecticut, studied at Amherst, and worked as a stockbroker in New York, before relocating to California. The two formed the firm Judson and Brown in the late 1870s. Brown immediately recognized the agricultural possibilities of the barren valley. The adobe colored soil, the perpetually sunny, dry days and cool nights was a climate perfectly suited for citrus crops.
In November 1881 the two filed a map for Redlands, selling their first plot of land on December 6, 1881. Within two years they contracted to provide water to the town and in July 1883 began construction of the dam at a narrow point at the west end of the Santa Ana River, a journey which took two days by stage and burro.
The album opens with four views of the ashlar rock dam, 52 feet high, which cost a reported $68,000 to build. We can date these first views to pre-1885, since massive, partially submerged dead trees have not yet been cut down. Referring to plate 116:
"This is the view of the Rock Dam a year after it was constructed. This is also the first view of the infamous Big Bear Lake. All of the trees sticking up from the water were cut off at the water line during the first winter when the lake froze over. Circa 1885."
In the plates that follow various men can be seen but are not identified. It is conceivable that the figures are Brown, Judson, Walter C. Butler, or Ammon Platt Kitching. Butler was from New Haven and became assistant engineer with Brown on the dam construction. Financing for the project came from Ammon Platt Kitching; he was appointed general manager for Bear Valley Irrigation Company and may also have posed for the photographer.
The next ten plates seem intent on showing how impassable the wilderness was, but we reach the valley floor and see proof of the impossible. Narrow ditches flowing with fresh water from the Santa Ana River have transformed the wasteland.
"At this writing, Oct 16, 1897...looking eastward, toward the colossal peaks, where ten years ago was an almost unbroken stretch of red soil, we now behold, clear up to the eastern foothills, a continuous succession of magnificent orange groves, divided by broad and beautiful avenues, lined with ornamental trees and varied form and verdure."
Frank Brown inscribed the album to Dr. Paul C. Skiff, another resident of New Haven. Skiff was born in 1827 on Skiff Mountain, and at the age of 16 went to live with his aunt in Warren, Ohio. After earning a medical degree he returned to New Haven and set up practice. He acquired an orange grove in California, presumably from Judson and Brown.
F.H. Maude and Company were landscape photographers in Los Angeles, California.
Titles and images available upon request..