An Exceptional Gilded Age Chicago Masonic Photographic Archive, ca. 1875–1892
125+ Identified Cabinet Photographs, including more than 80 C.D. Mosher “Memorial Portraits,” preserved with their monumental custom Imperial Lodge album.
An extraordinary and apparently unique institutional photographic archive assembled for Covenant Lodge No. 526, A.F. & A.M., Chicago, comprising more than 125 identified cabinet-card portraits of members, officers, businessmen, professionals, and prominent Illinois Freemasons. The collection is particularly distinguished by an exceptional concentration of photographs by Chicago historical photographer C. D. Mosher, including more than 80 examples of his unusual “Memorial Portrait” series.
The photographs were preserved in the Lodge's monumental custom album, . Bound in dark pebbled leather, decorated in blind and gilt, and lettered on the upper cover “COVENANT LODGE / NO. 526, A.F. & A.M.”, the volume contains elaborate gilt-edged window mounts designed to accommodate 172 cabinet photographs, together with a specialized page for larger-format portraits.
The great significance of the archive lies in its remarkable representation of the work of C. D. Mosher, National Historical Photographer of Chicago. More than 80 portraits bear Mosher's imprint, many from the consecutively numbered 7200–7500 series, with the sitters' names and identification numbers written directly beneath their portraits.
Rather than an ordinary studio photographer's trade card, the imprint describes an ambitious historical portrait enterprise intended to preserve photographic likenesses of Chicagoans as a permanent record of the city's development. Mosher promoted his work as a “National Historical” undertaking and solicited portraits for a memorial collection connected with Chicago's civic history.
Of particular importance is the relationship between these photographs and Mosher's larger Chicago memorial project. Mosher undertook the systematic creation and collection of portraits intended to document the men associated with the growth of Chicago and to form a historical photographic record for the city. The present archive appears to represent a parallel institutional manifestation of that undertaking: an extensive Mosher portrait record devoted specifically to a major Chicago Masonic lodge and its membership.
No second Covenant Lodge album of this type is presently known to the consignor, and the present group is believed to be among the largest surviving concentrated collections of Mosher Memorial Portraits outside the photographer's civic memorial work assembled for Chicago. The survival of the original custom album, numbered portraits, manuscript identifications, and printed Memorial Offering versos provides unusual documentary context rarely encountered with isolated examples of Mosher's work.
The archive documents several generations of the membership of Covenant Lodge No. 526 during Chicago's extraordinary post-Fire expansion. The men represented were participants in the city's commercial, industrial, professional, legal, medical, and fraternal life.
Research comparing the inscriptions on the photographs with contemporary Masonic records has identified Lodge officers and members appearing in official returns. The archive therefore functions not simply as a collection of portraits, but as a visual membership register of a late-19th-century Chicago Masonic institution.
The collection also provides a remarkable collective portrait of the generation that participated in rebuilding and expanding Chicago during the final quarter of the nineteenth century.
Identified subjects include figures associated with manufacturing, music, pharmaceuticals, restaurants and catering, metallurgy, paving, jewelry, real estate, and other Chicago enterprises, among them:
Charles N. Post, associated with Lyon & Healy; Philip H. Mallen, of the P. H. Mallen homeopathic pharmaceutical concern; William Mangler, prominent Chicago caterer and restaurateur; Thomas E. Miller, associated with the Chicago & Aurora Smelting and Refining Company; Albert W. Perkins, associated with Western Paving & Supply Co.; S. N. Clarkson, jeweler and diamond merchant; and William Henry Horine, a merchant of the Civil War generation.
Other identified sitters include August Strobel, Charles Jondorf, Joseph F. Garcia, H. A. Goodrich, George W. Berry, M. C. Reynolds, J. B. Hall, F. O. Johnson, J. H. McKay, Louis M. Hoffman, Abraham Deys, W. B. Flershem, Anton Rohde, Louis Widmayer, Oscar H. Guezel, and numerous others.
Although Mosher predominates, approximately 45 additional cabinet photographs represent a broad cross-section of Chicago's late-19th-century photographic establishment. Studios represented include Brand's, Hartley, Stevens, Bell, V. Georg, Gehrig, Place, Loveday, Morrison, Harrison, Henshel, Scholl, and others, together with several regional photographers.
As such, the collection has significance beyond Masonic history. It forms a substantial comparative archive of Chicago portrait photography during the cabinet-card era, while the consistency of subject matter and institutional provenance gives the group a coherence normally absent from accumulations of period photographs.
Most surviving cabinet photographs have long since been separated from the albums and organizations for which they were made. The Covenant Lodge archive is exceptional because the photographs can be reconstructed as a single body and many of the sitters remain identified.
More importantly, the archive preserves what may be the largest presently known coherent group of C. D. Mosher Memorial Portraits outside the body of material created for Chicago's civic memorial project. The unusually dense sequence of Mosher numbers, repeated Memorial Offering backs, named sitters, and original institutional album provides potentially important evidence for reconstructing the scope and methodology of Mosher's largely forgotten historical photographic enterprise.
Taken as a whole, the archive is simultaneously a record of Gilded Age Chicago, Illinois Freemasonry, nineteenth-century portrait photography, and Mosher's ambitious effort to create a photographic memorial of the generation that built the city.
Condition
General light rubbing, toning, and edge wear. Some internal card frames with separation. Fine.
