STAFFORD – Before people took pictures using film — and certainly before cell phones — photos were captured using glass plate negatives.
That type of photography — mostly commonly used in the late 19th century and early 20th century — was made famous by the likes of landscape photographer Ansel Adams and Civil War photographer Mathew Brady.
In Stafford, the history museum has a collection of more than 30,000 glass plate negatives, all shot by one man.
William Gray took photos of almost every family who ever lived in Stafford County, from about 1905 to 1947.
“They are just like a complete time capsule of the history of St. John and the county,” said Michael Hathaway, director of the Stafford County Museum.
No one knew what the museum really had until Hathaway brought the negatives up from the basement of the town’s old bank building and moved them into the museum’s library. That was in 2004.
For nearly a decade, the historical society received multiple grants from several Kansas organizations — including nearly $14,000 from Humanities Kansas — to help restore and catalog the negatives. The plates, which hold reverse photographic images transferred onto glass, had to be handled carefully.
“We have been told that it’s the largest collection that pertains to one geographical area in the country,” Hathaway said.
Gray was from nearby St. John. He took photos of everything: farmers in the field, women in hammocks, street shenanigans after Halloween, and Exoduster families, African Americans who homesteaded in Kansas.
“There were many surprises,” Hathaway said. “We thought at first that it would just be a lot of studio shots. But we found that Mr. Gray traveled all around the town and all around the county and took pictures of buildings and people’s homes.”
The glass negatives are housed in a bank vault across the brick street from the museum’s office. Gray kept 11 ledgers dutifully noting each of the 30,000 photos.
By going through the negatives, Hathaway said, the museum learned more about the history of the county. In the late 1870s and early 1880s, so many former slaves flocked to Kansas that they were nicknamed “Exodusters.” By 1910, it is estimated there were as many as 400 African Americans living in Stafford County.
“We have had people come from all over Kansas and all over the country,” Hathaway said.
“And then, we’ve had … a visitor from the Marshall Islands and … a visitor from Monaco. Both of them had read about our glass negatives on the internet.”
Pat Houston is one of the volunteers who helped restore and catalog the negatives.
“I had never seen a glass negative before,” Houston said. “One of the most fun parts of the whole project was looking at them and seeing what was important to people back then — whether it was the ladies' great big hats, their children, or how long their hair — whatever was in the picture.”
There’s a portrait of a World War I soldier, a fiddle player, beauty queens and Buicks, babies and people who stare unblinking back at the camera.
The next step for the museum is to scan and upload the photos to the internet, which it’s doing with the help of Fort Hays State University.
“What I learned was that the things that were important to people back then are the exact same things that are important to us now — family and friends, communities, churches and schools,” Hathaway said.
“Those are the things that still make our life special in small town Kansas.”