As steamboats picked up and dropped off tradable goods in Boone County’s river towns, they often arrived with entrepreneurs aboard, offering unique services and all types of entertaining diversions; one of these was photography. As portrait photos of various types began to gain popularity, photographers took to the river to drum up business, sometimes aboard their own floating studios. Newspapers advertised these “Daguerreotype Artists” who traveled on the river, making their living with this new and trending technology.
Daguerreotypes, developed in the late 1830s, were popular and widely available by the 1850s but could be cost-prohibitive for average-income families. For context, lower-wage workers could expect to pay up to a full week’s wages for one image. In the early 1850s, ambrotypes and tintypes offered alternative options for consumers, but the nickname of the first option stayed with photographers for years. Tintypes, most associated with Civil War era photos, were printed on metal and marketed in folding paper envelopes, unlike their counterparts which were printed on glass and placed in fancy, hinged cases. Tintypes also had a quicker developing time which made them more affordable and ultimately the most popular choice with the general public.
According to the diary of Petersburg resident Lewis Loder, Boone County was a regular stop for 19th century traveling photographers. A photo-boat docked for several days in Petersburg in 1858 as the photographer, working only for tips, documented colorful patrons of Schramm’s Tavern. Another entry referred to an “Uncle Sam Artist” traveling on a “Daguerring-boat” who stopped in Petersburg twice in two months, but it’s unclear if he was the photographer or a costumed character available to pose with subjects.
Additional mentions involved photographers arriving not by boat but in steam-powered “cars on wheels” in the late 1850s. People were fascinated with the contraption and happily paid to have their photo taken with it as a prop. In September 1858, two men came to Petersburg School to give a free public exhibition of their “panorama show of Cincinnati”. These unnamed men may have been William S. Porter and Charles Fontayne, who famously captured the entire Cincinnati riverfront in a series of panorama shots taken in 1848.
As photography evolved and became more available, an increasing number of people were having their images captured for the ages. The mentions in Loder’s diary began to change from the artist visiting the subject to the subject visiting the artist at his studio. Many examples of these early images can be found in family photo albums and have held up to time, giving a glimpse of days long past.
