She was born more than 200 years ago and there’s something about the
elderly in the 1800s that fascinates us. Can you see her glasses? And
that bonnet!
Victorian portraits of American Revolutionary War veterans are also fascinating!
This is Lemuel Cook, photographed in the 1860s and interviewed for the 1864 book, The Last Men of the Revolution. He enlisted in the war in 1781 at age 16 and served at the Battle of Brandywine and was present when the British surrendered at Yorktown. He died at the age of 106 in 1866, having lived through both the Revolutionary War and the Civil War:
Samuel Downing was 15 when he joined the Continental Army and guarded forts in New York. He was born in 1764 and was roughly 100 years old when this photograph was taken:
Albert Gallatin was born in Switzerland in 1761. He served as a volunteer at Fort Machias in Maine. After the war, Gallatin served three terms in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives, became the U.S. minister to France, Secretary of the Treasury, and helped found New York University. Gallatin died in 1849. This photo was taken in the 1840s, only a few years after the first known portrait of a human being was taken:
Abraham Wheelright was born in 1757–only one year after Mozart. He was 19 in 1776 when he joined an infantry regiment. Wheelright was present at the crossing of the Delaware (the event that famous painting depicts. You know. The one where George Washington looks like he’s on the cover of Vogue.) Wheelright also fought at the Battle of Princeton and the Battle of Trenton. He died in 1850, meaning the photo below, like Gallatin’s picture, was taken when photography was growing in popularity but still in its infancy:
The fact that photos exist of men who fought in the Revolutionary War– more than 240 years ago–really brings things into perspective: we can look into the faces of men who knew Washington, who went from candles to gas lamps, from hamlets to major cities, from wooden ships to steamboats. History is right there–it isn’t a cold marble bust on the mantle. It’s living and breathing, and very, very close to us.
