The Photographer Who Filmed for the Government, and the $20 Cabinets of His Negatives

Around 1973, three large cabinets of glass and film negatives and a chair went for $20 at an estate sale. The buyer, Howard Lehman, recognized the significance of the images, which feature Yellowstone, the C&O Canal, Great Falls, Shenandoah, Yosemite and Washington, DC. They were made by Ezra B. Thompson, a commercial photographer, lecturer, government employee and contractor who was also the first employee to make motion picture films for the US government. Lehman donated approximately 25 linear feet of them to the National Park Service (NPS) History Collection in 1974.

A career that is hard to pin down

Ezra Bowen Thompson was born in 1865 in Raleigh, North Carolina. After his father died in 1871 and his mother remarried, he and his sister took their stepfather's surname, Holleman. In the mid-1890s he moved to Washington, DC, and went back to Thompson. In 1895 he was a "signwriter," and by 1903 the city directory listed him as a photographer.

According to research by Susan Barsy, who has seen his civilian personnel file, he began working for the US Geological Survey in 1903. The NPS archivists have not seen the file themselves and cannot say whether the job was temporary or part-time, though they suspect it was. A 1905 register of federal employees lists him as an assistant photographer paid $2 a day, which suggests he was paid only "when actually employed." It is the only time he appears in that register.

That year he was in the West, but probably not for the Survey. A newspaper reported that he was filming Yellowstone for the Park Transportation Company, to go with its winter lecture program, work he did from at least 1905 to 1907. He opened a store in 1904 selling stereopticon supplies, cameras and lantern slides. Newspapers kept calling him a "government photographer" even when he was working for himself or for others, which has added to the confusion.

The first Army aeroplane test flight at Fort Myer, Virginia, in September 1908; Orville Wright is the man in the dark suit at the plane (NPS History Collection, photo by E.B. Thompson, HFCA 1174).

His clearest government job began in January 1908, when he became chief of the photographic department of the Interior Department's Bureau of Reclamation. That summer he spent two months in Idaho filming mining, a sheep-shearing factory, farming, irrigation and scenery; the films were shown at the 1909 Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition in Seattle to attract settlers. He also filmed tree-felling for the Forest Service. In September 1908 he documented the Wright brothers' Army test flight at Fort Myer. That film is lost, though it may have been spliced into the Army Signal Corps film in the National Archives. It is sometimes called the first government-produced film, but Thompson had already been making motion pictures for the government.

He was furloughed with pay from the Reclamation Service in 1911, according to Barsy, and his appointment ended in summer 1912. After that he ran his own business and took government contracts, including a 1914 trip to Alaska. By the 1920s and 1930s directories described the business as photographic supplies, and in 1940 the census called him proprietor of a motion picture supply company. He sold more than 1,800 lantern slides and glass plate negatives of Washington to the DC Public Library for $1,000 as he prepared to retire in 1944. He then returned to North Carolina and died in Burnsville on April 20, 1951.

Thompson's van, used to carry his moving picture equipment and to advertise his business (NPS History Collection, photo by E.B. Thompson, HFCA 1174).

From estate sale to archive

His films appear to be lost or sit unidentified in other collections, and much of his Washington work is at the DC Public Library and the DC History Center. What happened to the rest after his move or death is unclear, but a large collection of his negatives resurfaced around 1973, which is when Lehman bought the cabinets. The NPS History Collection is a good home for them: most parks keep only collections tied to their own boundaries, and spreading Thompson's work across many parks would have broken it up, while the History Collection keeps it as one body in line with professional practice.

What the negatives show

C&O Canal. The canal was a favorite subject from about 1910 until the canal closed in 1924, and Thompson photographed the everyday lives of the families who worked it, many of them women and children. Small children were often tied to a mast to keep them from falling overboard.

A woman steering a canal boat down the C&O Canal in 1910; "Canal Towage Co., No. 42" is stenciled on the boat (NPS History Collection, photo by E.B. Thompson, HFCA 1174).

Yellowstone. His earliest documented trip was in 1903, when President Theodore Roosevelt visited, and his motion pictures of the park were shown at the 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis. A newspaper account said Yellowstone's visitor numbers more than doubled the next year. In October 1905 he returned for the Park Transportation Company's scheme to advertise the park, a free traveling lecture program begun by superintendent George Breck in 1904 and given by E.C. Culver. Breck called Thompson one of the greatest moving-picture experts in the country, and the papers promised the first moving pictures of wild animals in their native haunts. In 1906 he filmed antelope near the Roosevelt Arch, deer near Mammoth Hot Springs Hotel, bear feedings, geyser eruptions and tourists, and then toured with Culver and Breck in a private Northern Pacific car nicknamed "Yellowstone Park." These films have not been found.

President Theodore Roosevelt (left) and acting superintendent Major John Pitcher at Liberty Cap, Yellowstone, 1903 (NPS History Collection, photo by E.B. Thompson, HFCA 1174).

Alaska. On June 21, 1914, he reached St. Paul Island in the Pribilofs, on the R.C. McCulloch, with scientists studying the seal herd. As a contractor for the Government Board of the Panama-Pacific Exposition he was to film seals and sealing. He also shot the Taku Glacier, Taku River scenery and mines in Alaska with the E.P. Pond expedition.

Ketchikan totem poles, 1914 (NPS History Collection, photo by E.B. Thompson, HFCA 1174).

Washington, DC. Most of the collection's Washington images date to the 1920s and include special events, people, buildings and aerial views. Living in the capital, he photographed the inaugurations of William McKinley in 1901, Woodrow Wilson in 1913 and Warren G. Harding in 1921, and also worked at Wakefield, Virginia, and Great Falls, Maryland.

The Lincoln Memorial shortly after its completion in 1922 (NPS History Collection, photo by E.B. Thompson, HFCA 1174).

The National Mall from the Washington Monument to the Lincoln Memorial, about 1943; the temporary office buildings on the right were built by the Defense Department soon after the United States entered World War II (NPS History Collection, photo by E.B. Thompson, HFCA 1174).

Sources

• National Park Service, 50 Nifty Finds #19: A Lens on History; the page cites city directories, the 1905 federal employee register, period newspapers, Susan Barsy's research on Thompson and the E.B. Thompson Collection (HFCA 1174) in the NPS History Collection; rewritten in hubnx's own words.