19th Century New York History

19th Century New York History - Vintage silver print glossy fiber 5 x 8 inch photograph credited to Leonard Dakin.

Leonard Dakin in the eighteen eighties was the operator of a prosperous Florida orange grove—a business that permitted him to spend much of each summer at the pleasant home of his grandfather, Horatio Olcott, in Cherry Valley, New York. It was a rendezvous for several branches of the family, and the leisurely holidays there gave Dakin a fine chance to practice his hobby--photography. His equipment was simple, but his pictorial sense was refined.

Sometime in the eighteen nineties the photographer carefully laid away his glass negatives, each in a manila envelope properly numbered and labelled. “It was sixty years later,” his daughter relates, “that his youngest son, Herbert, found some two hundred of them in the barn of the old family homestead..." 

Image circa late 1800s; printed in the second half of the 20th century as part of the American Heritage Publishing Archive.

Verso bears original handwritten ID notations and credit stampings. In very good condition.

Provenance: From the American Heritage Publishing Archives.