1st Woman Photojournalist Climbed High for a Shot

From climbing into a hot air balloon to sneaking photographs of a murder trial where cameras were prohibited, Jessie Tarbox Beals earned the reputation of doing whatever it took to obtain pictures.

Few women worked as photographers at the time, and they typically confined their work to portrait studios, but Beals became the first female photojournalist in 1900 when a Vermont newspaper published her photos of a fair.

First female photojournalist
Jessie Tarbox Beals

Born in 1870 in Canada, Jessie Tarbox was “a bright and precocious child” and earned her teaching credentials at the age of 17. She moved to Massachusetts, where her brother lived, and taught in Williamsburg and, later, Greenfield. Her interest in photography started in 1888 when, as a teacher, she won a small camera through Youth’s Companion magazine. She soon bought a more expensive camera and, in her first week of using it, earned $10.

Soon her interest in photography took precedent and she resigned from teaching after 10 years.

She married Alfred Tennyson Beals in 1897 and began to teach him the basics of photography and darkroom work.

Jessie obtained her first professional assignment in 1899, photographing the Massachusetts state prison for the Boston Post. In 1900, the couple began working as itinerant photographers, with Alfred as Beals’ darkroom assistant.

When funds ran out in 1901, they settled in Buffalo, NY, and Jessie was hired by the Buffalo Inquirer and The Buffalo Courier, making her the first woman staff photographer. Photojournalism was physically strenuous and often dangerous work. Beals became known for climbing ladders in her ankle-length dresses and large hats, while carrying her bulky 8x10 glass plate camera and 50 pounds of equipment. During a murder trial the judge ordered off-limits to photographers, Beals climbed atop a bookcase to shoot pictures through a transom window. Photos she took of Sir Thomas Lipton, inventor of the tea bag, during his visit to Buffalo were published in newspapers throughout the country.

After 18 months, she and Alfred left for the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition (aka World’s Fair) in St. Louis. With some effort, she convinced the organizers to provide her a press permit, and her photographs of that event have become her most enduring and well-known. She became the Fair photographer for the New York Herald, Tribune, and Leslie's Weekly, three Buffalo newspapers, and all the local St. Louis papers, and eventually for the Fair's own publicity department, producing over 3,500 photographs of the Fair.

Jessie Tarbox Beals taking photos from
a ladder at the 1904 World's Fair

Beals had a different style from most news photographers at the time, and was willing to “hustle” (her term) to get interesting shots. She not only climbed ladders and went up in a hot air balloon, but she captured candid images of visiting dignitaries, including William Howard Taft and then-President Theodore Roosevelt. She also liked to take a series of photographs for which a writer would later be assigned, a departure from the typical newspaper process. She developed a series on the indigenous peoples who were highlighted at the Fair and explored the differences in motherhood between cultures. 

Jessie Tarbox capturing
images of the streets
 of New York City, ca. 1905

 After the Fair, Beals and her husband opened a studio in New York City, where she was the photographer and he ran the business. Her depiction of the bohemian lifestyle of Greenwich Village is well-known, but her assignments ranged from photographing auto races to portraits of society figures and more celebrities, including Mark Twain, Emily Post, and Presidents Coolidge, Hoover, and Taft.

Despite her success, the marriage struggled. Her daughter Nanette was born in 1911, but by 1917, the couple had separated. Beals opened a new studio and gallery in Greenwich Village in 1920, but caring for Nanette as a single mother with a career proved challenging. Nanette suffered from rheumatoid arthritis and was frequently hospitalized. Eventually Jessie sent her to camps, private boarding schools, and friends.

Jessie began to specialize in photographing gardens and estates of the wealthy. In 1929, she took Nanette and moved to California, where she was in great demand by the Hollywood crowd to take pictures of their estates. The Great Depression brought an end to that business, and she and Nanette returned to Greenwich Village in 1933.

Photo of children in NYC
  by Jessie Tarbox Beals, circa 1915

Making a living as a photographer became more difficult due to the economy, and Jessie’s health began to decline, in part as a result of the physical challenges she took during her career. In 1942, she died at Bellevue Hospital. She was 71. Her ex-husband Alfred did not attend her funeral, though he lived nearby.

Because Beals moved so many times and ended her life in poverty, she did not retain many of her negative plates. But efforts by other photographers resulted in her work being included in collections at the Library of Congress, Harvard University, the New York Historical Society, and the American Museum of Natural History.

She summed up her philosophy as a woman photojournalist in 1904: “If one is the possessor of health and strength, a good news instinct . . . a fair photographic outfit, and the ability to hustle, which is the most necessary qualification, one can be a news photographer.”

Sources

Women Photojournalists: Jessie Tarbox Beals - Biographical Essay(Prints and Photographs Reading Room, Library of Congress) (loc.gov) 

First behind the camera: Photojournalist Jessie Tarbox Beals — Harvard Gazette 

Jessie Tarbox Beals | Women’s Rights Advocate, Documentary Photographer | Britannica 

Jessie Tarbox Beals - Wikipedia 

Multi-award-winning author Marie Wells Coutu finds beauty in surprising places, like undiscovered treasures, old houses, and gnarly trees. All three books in her Mended Vessels series, contemporary stories based on the lives of biblical women, have won awards in multiple contests. She is currently working on historical romances set in her native western Kentucky in the 1930s and ‘40s. An unpublished novel, Shifting Currents, is a finalist in the nationally recognized Maggie Awards.

Her historical short story, “All That Glistens,” was included in the 2023 Saturday Evening Post Great American Fiction collection and is now available free when you sign up for Marie's newsletter here. In her newsletter, she shares about her writing, historical tidbits, recommended books, and sometimes recipes.

FOOD AT THE FAIR

Myths and Facts About Food at St. Louis Fair

by Martha Rogers


One of the things I love most about any fair or carnival is the food. Cotton candy, corn dogs, and funnel cakes being my favorite, and three foods that always remind me of the fun times on the midway at the Texas State Fair.

A lot of foods were said to have been introduced in St. Louis at the 1904 fair, and the stories embellished through the years. However, some of the stories are true or partly true.

The foods and beverages, whether new or simply little known, took off in popularity after the fair. According to some sources, the list includes hot dogs, ice cream cones, the hamburger, iced tea, peanut butter, and cotton candy.

Some of the stories are quite dramatic even if not completely true. For example, Anton Feuchtwanger gave out white gloves to his patrons to hold his steamed sausages. After too many patrons walked off with the gloves, he asked his brother-in-law to bake buns to hold the meat instead, there was born the hot dog.

Another one, equally dramatic, and closer to the truth, concerns the ice cream cone. Ernest Hamwi was a waffle concessionaire next to an ice cream vendor. When the ice cream man ran out serving dishes, Hamwi rolled up a thin waffle, scooped some cream into it, and voila, there was the ice cream cone.

Other stories like the ones for iced tea and the hamburger were easily proven to be untrue and are less dramatic.

Although Dr. Pepper had been in existence in Texas where it was bottled, it was not widely known. After being sold at the fair, it took off in popularity and became more than a Texas soft drink.

My favorite of the foods at the fair is how cotton candy was made. A vendor had a machine patented by Thomas Patton in 1900 and invented in 1897 by two candy makers from Nashville, Tennessee, John C. Wharton and William Morrison. The vendor poured the sugar into the center post of the spinning bowl, then the spinning motion spun the sugar into a light, fluffy mass of feather-like candy called Fairy Floss.

     

The sugar candy was boxed and sold for 25 cents each. Customers fascinated by the process and the confection bought 68,655 boxes. The term “cotton candy” came into play in 1920. Today you will find blue, pink, white and even green cotton candy sold at fairs, ball stadiums and carnivals all over the country.

Puffed rice, yellow mustard and peanut butter are among other foods became widely popular after those few months in St. Louis. George French introduced his yellow sauce that became a common staple of foods. A young man, Alexander Pierce Anderson was working in his laboratory when he stumbled on the process for “puffing” rice or other grain and quickly sold the idea to Quaker Oats, but they weren’t seeing much market potential for it. To win some hearts and minds, Anderson set up shop at the 1904 World’s Fair and managed to puff (and sell) more than 20,000 pounds of rice. Puffed cereal was born.

Along with the vendors of foods, restaurants offered the best food available in beautiful settings. One of those was the Luchow-Faust World’s Fair Restaurant in the Tyrolean Alps section of the Pike. Two men, August Luchow and Tony Faust combined their two restaurants into one high-class establishment. They offered crystal clear water that was supposed absolutely pure for the price of five cents a glass. That’s the equivalent of $1.20 today.

They gave fancy names to foods served in smaller restaurants and charged a higher price for them. The restaurant’s atmosphere and décor made up for the higher prices. Seating 5000 diners, it resembled a Tyrolean Alps chateau and featured costumed singers and wait staff. It also had an enormous beer hall.

No matter whether the stories are fact or fiction, these foods became even more popular after the fair. The real legacy of the fair is that, for a few brief months in the city of St. Louis, fairgoers were fascinated by an entire culture of eating that was being remade for the modern world.

What are your favorite foods at a fair or carnival? Answer in a comment below and be entered in a drawing for a copy of my book, MEET ME AT THE FAIR, set in St. Louis during the fair.

We didn't have enough entries last month for the drawing, so if you entered last month, you will be in this month and making another comment will give you another entry. Be sure to include your email address.

Laurel has a tragic past and the rejections of men who can’t see beyond her scars keep her from opening up to others and the scars well covered. The first time Trent sees her, he is smitten with her beauty and her delicious candy. When she goes to St. Louis to open her candy booth at the fair, Trent seizes the opportunity to learn more about her. He sees beyond the scars to the intelligent and talented businesswoman she is, but can she open her heart to find a love stronger and deeper than any physical scars.

Martha Rogers is a multi-published author and writes a weekly devotional for ACFW. Martha and her husband Rex live in Houston, Texas where they are active members of First Baptist Church. They are the parents of three sons and grandparents to eleven grandchildren and great-grandparents to four, soon to be five. Martha is a retired teacher with twenty-eight years teaching Home Economics and English at the secondary level and eight years at the college level supervising student teachers and teaching freshman English. She is the Director of the Texas Christian Writers Conference held in Houston in August each year, a member of ACFW, ACFW WOTS chapter in Houston, and a member of the writers’ group, Inspirational Writers Alive.

Find Martha at: www.marthawrogers.com

World's Fair Exhibits

World’s Fair Contributions to Science

The St. Louis Exposition of 1904 

by Martha Rogers

Welcome to the Fair

Palace of Electricity

Many of the inventions on exhibit at the fair were forerunners to items that have become an integral part of our culture today. The Palace exhibited novel applications of electricity and how light waves could be used for communication and medical means were on display. The men behind the exhibit wanted to dispel the misconceptions people had about the dangers of electricity and educate them as to the possibilities for use. This photo is how the building looked in the daytime near the Lagoon and fountains.

 The palace also contained many communications exhibits. These included a wireless telephone or radiophone. The crowds were enthralled with being able to hear spoken messages transmitted from an apparatus in the Palace to a telephone receiver in the courtyard. Alexander Graham Bell invented the radiophone with a transmitter that transformed sound waves into light waves then into a receiver which converted them back into sound waves and became the precursor for the radio and early mobile phones which eventually evolved into our modern day cell phone.

The Fax Machine or telautograph was invented in 1888 by Elisha Gray and improved upon to be displayed at the fair. This was a device which sent electrical impulses to the receiving pen of the device to recreate drawings to a piece of paper at the same time a person wrote them in longhand on the other end.

At night, the fair became a virtual fairyland of light. Here is the Palace as it looked at night.

Palace of Transportation

Exhibits showcased vehicles which would revolutionize transportation for the future. Among them were the electric street railcars, the personal automobile or motor car powered by gasoline, electricity, and steam. 

This is a how the automobile exhibits 
One were arranged.





One of the largest was the locomotive pictured here.

Lee de Forest also exhibited a prototype car radio. The fair hosted the first ever “Airship Contest” and offered a grand prize of $100,000 to an airship or other flying machine that managed the best time through a course set out. Viewers became witnessed to the first public dirigible flight in America. This event led to the city’s nickname of “Flight City.”   

On The Pike

The Pike was a mile long midway much like we see at fairs today. It featured rides, amusements, food, and fantastic exhibitions for fun. Although a primary source of pleasure, many of its features were educational as well. This aerial photo gives a good picture of the length of The Pike.

 The expression “coming down the Pike” originated from this feature because one never knew what to expect. Exhibits included a Blarney Castle, a Parisian fashion show, wild animals, model ships staging a replica of the Naval Battle of Santiago, and a visit to the North Pole.

One of the most interesting was the display of Medical contributions. I was amazed by them. Things like the X-ray machine and infant incubator were on included. Invented in 1895 by German scientist, Wilhelm Rontgen, the machine was developed and perfected by Thomas Edison with his assistant Clarence Dally for exhibit at the 1904 Exposition. The infant incubator was an air-tight glass box with a metal frame.

 Here a nurse is attending an infant in an incubator on display.

This is the exhibit and how people were able to view the babies. 

Constant temperature was maintained by pumping in hot air. This provided a sanitary environment to reduce infection and preserve the lives of children born pre-maturely. The exhibit had ten nurses who cared for twenty-four neo-natal babies in the incubators. Glass walls separated the babies from visitors and prevented germ exposure. Known today as “isolettes,” this invention is a vital component of neo-natal intensive care units (NICU) all over our nation.

The Liberal Arts Palace was a nine-acre building housing some of the world's finest exhibits classified as Liberal Arts. These included models of famous lighthouses, a coin collection from the British Mint, photography, musical instruments and art from around the world. China had a display of ancient books and art from its people.

Researching all the exhibits from around the world revealed more and more fascinating displays.

For a chance to win a copy of my book, Meet Me at the Fair set at the fair in 1904 leave a comment answering one of the questions below along with your email address and be included in the drawing. 

1. What is your favorite part of going to the fair?
2. Which exhibit mentioned in the blog would you most liked to have visited?
3. Does your state have its own fair every year?



MEET ME AT THE FAIR
Laurel has a tragic past and the rejections of men who can't see beyond her scars keep her from opening up to others, and she keeps the scars well-

hidden. The first time Trent sees her, he is smitten with both her beauty and her delicious candy. When she goes to St. Louis to open her candy booth at the fair, Trent seizes the opportunity to learn more about her. He sees beyond the scars to the intelligent and talented business woman she is, but can she open her heart and trust him to find a love stronger and deeper than any physical scars?

Martha Rogers is a multi-published author and writes a weekly devotional for ACFW. Martha and her husband Rex live in Houston, Texas where they are active members of First Baptist Church. They are the parents of three sons and grandparents to eleven grandchildren and great-grandparents to four, soon to be five. Martha is a retired teacher with twenty-eight years teaching Home Economics and English at the secondary level and eight years at the college level supervising student teachers and teaching freshman English. She is the Director of the Texas Christian Writers Conference held in Houston in August each year, a member of ACFW, ACFW WOTS chapter in Houston, and a member of the writers’ group, Inspirational Writers Alive.

Find Martha at:  www.marthawrogers.com

Scott Joplin - King of Ragtime

With Nancy J. Farrier

Maple Leaf Rag by Scott Joplin

Who doesn’t find their toe tapping to the lively rhythm of ragtime music? The beat inspires joy and lifts the spirits. This month, I want to take a look at Scott Joplin, the leading composer of ragtime music.

Scott Joplin, born in Texarkana, Texas in 1868, grew up in a family of music lovers. His father, a farm laborer, played the violin. His mother, a house cleaner and laundress, played the banjo and sang. Joplin learned to play piano on the instrument owned by his parent’s employer. He also took music lessons.

Scott began performing as a teenager. Besides playing piano, he played the violin and cornet. He also had a nice singing voice and often sang as part of his performance. In the 1880’s he began to travel, spending time in several places, one of them being Sedalia, Missouri, which would become his home later in his life. Joplin played with different forms of music such as marches and waltz’s, adding in some African American rhythms and melodies to change them. In 1893, he traveled Chicago and played outside the World’s Fair. There, he met musician, Otis Saunders, who encouraged him to write down the music he wrote.

After moving to Sedalia, MO, Joplin enrolled in the George R. Smith College to study music. He wanted to learn how to transfer the songs in his head to musical notation on paper so other musicians would be able to play his works. He caught on to the concept very quickly and published several original compositions, in addition to some co-written with fellow musicians.

His popularity grew and in 1899, a local music store owner and publisher, printed Joplin’s, “Maple Leaf Rag.” The catchy song earned him the title of “King of Ragtime Writers.” Encouraged by the success, Joplin moved to St. Louis with his new bride, Belle, and friends who wrote music with him. His ragtime gained recognition. The conductor of the St. Louis Choral Symphony Society referred to Joplin as “an extraordinary genius.” Because of his music, Joplin was allowed access to places others of his race could not go, but only because he performed in those places.

Joplin’s private life was fraught with troubles. He and his first wife lost their infant child, and then the marriage ended. His second wife died shortly after they married in 1904. Joplin moved to New York, hoping for a fresh start and new opportunities. He struggled finanacially, not finding the backing he needed for his music. He married a third time, and his new wife, Lottie, supported his work and encouraged him.

Throughout his life, Scott Joplin wrote 44 songs—ragtime pieces—two operas, and one ragtime ballet. He also composed seven ragtime piano compositions with other composers. In 1916, he experienced debilitating physical and mental effects from an ongoing disease. In 1917, he required hospitalization and then was put in a mental institution. He died April 1, 1917.

After Joplin’s death, ragtime music fell from popularity with listeners. In the 1940’s jazz music caused a small revival of ragtime, but the real boost came in the 1970’s. Joplin’s, “The Entertainer,” received notoriety in the movie, The Sting. This brought about an increased interest in Joplin’s music. In 1976, the Pulitzer Committee issued a posthumous award to Scott Joplin for his contribution to American music.  He was truly the “King of Ragtime Music.”

Have you ever played Scott Joplin's ragtime music? Have you heard Maple Leaf Rag or The Entertainer? (You can click on the song titles to listen to them being played.) If you are familiar with his ragtime music, what song is your favorite? I would love to hear from you.

Nancy J Farrier is an award winning author who lives in Southern California in the Mojave Desert. She loves the Southwest with its interesting historical past. Nancy and her husband have five children and two grandsons. When Nancy isn’t writing, she loves to read, do needlecraft, play with her cats, and spend time with her family. Nancy is represented by Karen Ball of The Steve Laube Literary Agency. You can read more about Nancy and her books on her website: nancyjfarrier.com.