Object of the Month

Longfellow House - Washington's Headquarters National Historic Site has a large museum collection consisting of thousands of objects, many of which are not regularly displayed in the house's furnished exhibit rooms. Every month, an object will be featured on this page, providing a look at an unusual piece from the collection.

 

To herald the arrival of cold and snowy winter weather, this month’s object is a stereograph featuring an image of the Falls of Minnehaha in Minnesota in winter, with snow and ice encrusting the frozen waterfall. The image was published by the Whitney Gallery of St. Paul, Minnesota, and was part of a series titled “Gems of Minnesota”.

Joel Emmons Whitney was born in Phillips, Maine in 1822. By the 1850s he had moved to the Midwest and was assisting photographer Alexander Hesler, who is widely credited as the first person to photograph Minnehaha Falls. Hesler also claimed to have supplied Henry W. Longfellow with one of these images, pushing the (possibly false) story that the image helped inspire the poet to write The Song of Hiawatha. Whitney later established a career for himself as a photographer, printmaker and publisher. He became especially well known for his photographs documenting participants on both sides of the 1862 US-Dakota War in Minnesota.

Minnehaha Falls, located in present-day Minneapolis, is a picturesque location popularized in the American conscience by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s 1855 epic poem The Song of Hiawatha. The poem was a commercial success, selling tens of thousands of copies in the first couple of years after publication, and it spawned a whole industry of sculpture, painting, and photography of related subjects. Images of locations mentioned in the poem became sought-after souvenir items, with the Minnehaha Falls being one of the most popular scenes.

Whitney took advantage of his studio’s location just a few miles and across the Mississippi River from the falls to produce a series of images that were widely marketed to the public. He and his partner Charles Zimmerman photographed the falls in different seasons, and occasionally added illustrative quotes from poems on the reverse sides of their stereographs, such as with this one which has the following lines printed on the back -

Ho for a ‘Revel’ Is the Frost King’s cry,
And Ice and Snow with echoing Shout reply,
While on his Craftsmen, merry Jack Frost calls,
Their Art to show, in Minne-ha-ha’s Halls.

The lines, some of which are repeated on other stereograph views of Minnehaha Falls, are from an unattributed poem and do not appear to be Longfellow’s own work.

After Longfellow’s poem was published, Minnehaha Falls became a tourist destination (though Longfellow himself never visited the spot he helped make so famous). The many photographic images produced and sold by Whitney and others further enhanced the site’s popularity, which ultimately helped lead to the area being preserved as a park as early as the late 1880s. It remains a popular attraction today, with over 800,000 visitors a year, including in the winter when people come to view the frozen falls.

 

Click here to view past Objects of the Month.