In today’s visual media, a photograph can be everything. In my world of historic architecture, a photograph may be all that remains of a building – the only tangible evidence left of its existence, and by extension, the lives of the people that resided within its walls. Some of the most beautiful historic photographs I know – photographs that reverberate like echoes in my consciousness and distract me most delightfully – are those of the Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS), established in 1933.
On February 2, 1934, Theodore Webb took this image of the East Family Dwelling House at what is now known as Shaker Village of Pleasant Hill in Mercer County, Kentucky.
But the photograph is really only the surface detail. Who were the photographers hidden behind the lens? Theodore Webb, photographer, traveled across at least a dozen Kentucky counties in 1934, capturing buildings and structures that tell the story (some of it anyway) of Kentucky.
I pour over these haunting and lyrical images but I don’t know anything about the people behind the camera, and let’s face it, I am an architectural history nerd. Plus, I am a total groupie for photographers from the early days (Frances Benjamin Johnston!) and historic architects (don’t even ask me how excited I got when I talked to a great-granddaughter of John McMurtry last year).
The smokehouse at Rose Hill in Lexington, KY. Photograph taken on February 6, 1934, by Theodore Webb.
But before I lead you down the rabbit hole after the elusive Mr. Webb, a little background is in order. HABS came into being in order to “create a public archive of America’s architectural heritage, consisting of measured drawings, historical reports, and large-format black & white photographs.”* HABS is the highest level of documentation for a building – what I do everyday is but a pale imitation of a HABS-level survey.
The main stair hall at the Thomas Marshall House, U.S. Highway 68, Old Washington, Mason County, KY. Photograph by Theodore Webb.
The survey was intended to “cover structures of all types, from the smallest utilitarian structures to the largest and most monumental. Barns, bridges, mills, toll houses, jails, and in short buildings of every description are to be included so that a complete picture of the culture of the time as reflected in the buildings of the period may be put on record.”**
Those words, taken from the document proposing the creation of HABS, mean that the focus of the work was not just fancy or high-style buildings – but vernacular, everyday architecture.
Webb took this photo of a front gable stone outbuilding on March 30, 1934. It is labeled as the “Old Stone Kitchen” at Cross Keys Tavern, U.S. Route 60, Shelbyville, Shelby County, KY.
HABS was one program of President Roosevelt’s New Deal, providing jobs and investment across a country ravaged by the Great Depression. Unemployed architects, draftsman, historians, and photographers – around a thousand individuals – were hired to carry out the surveys of structures in each state.
But other than their name, linked to each photograph in the HABS collection (you too can tumble down the rabbit hole at the online home of digitized HABS documents!), I know nothing about the photographers themselves. The HABS collection, as amazing as it is, offers no tidbits about the folks who did the fieldwork. The one photograph I’ve found in Kentucky with people in it (and we usually hate having people in our photographs of buildings) features only the architects. Mr. Webb was once again in the background – holding the camera.
HABS architects pose for the camera at the Kentucky School for the Blind in Louisville, Kentucky. Photograph by Theodore Webb, March 16, 1934.
I conduct a great deal of research for this blog online. Since I write this in my free time (or in stolen moments when I should be doing something else), a trip to a library or county clerk’s office is near to impossible.
My first foray at tracing the elusive Theodore Webb in historic newspapers ended in abject failure. But I did learn that many newspapers across Kentucky ran stories about the effort to record historic buildings. There was even some grumbling from certain towns about why more of their buildings weren’t being documented (Danville, I’m looking at you).
An appeal in the February 27, 1934 edition of The Paducah Sun.
Usually I have an idea of where to start background research on an individual – I know where they lived, worked, or died. But while the framework of the state survey is well-described in various publications (each state survey was headed by a district officer. That person – in Kentucky’s case, architect G.M. Grimes – landed the position by virtue of being nominated by the local chapter of the American Institute of Architects), the structure of the worker bees (those folks out in the field) is quite vague.
A facade and side elevation view of the Old Closson House, Closson Court & Ringold Streets, Ludlow, Kenton County, Kentucky. Photograph by Theodore Webb.
On my second attempt at finding Theodore Webb, I got lucky. I guessed Theodore might be in his his 30s when he got the job with HABS, so I entered a birth date of 1900 in the Ancestry search engine, and…voila! A few pages of census information and I found a possible match – all based on profession and age.
Theodore P. Webb, photographer (if the source is correct).
Taking pictures ran in the Webb family. Theodore Phillips Webb was born in Everett, Massachusetts, on October 24, 1900 to William Carson and Ida Mae Phillips Webb. According to the 1910 census, the elder Webb made a living as a studio photographer. (In 1900, he made cigars.) The art of photography would have been an integral part of Theodore’s childhood. I wish I knew if his dad “brought” his work home and documented his growing family and home life, just as he captured the portraits of his clients.
W. Carson Webb and Robert Jackson Henninger in front of Webb Photography Studio. Race St., Cincinnati, Ohio about 1927 or 1928. Image found on Ancestry.
By 1920, Webb was living in Cincinnati (both of his parents were born in Ohio), where his father opened Webb Photography. Theodore shows up in Louisville by the end of the decade as working for the Standard Gravure Company.
In the 1930 census, a photographer by the name of Theodore P. Webb lived in Louisville, Kentucky, with his wife Nellie, stepdaughter Betty, and daughters Gloria and Jean. Webb was 29 years old and lived in Saint Matthews with his family.
The year his HABS photographs were taken – 1934 – Webb was working as an assistant photographer at the Scottow Studio in Louisville.***
A 1927 advertisement for Scottow Studio.
It seems likely that it was through his work that Webb learned about the HABS office being set up in Louisville. In a 2002 interview with another HABS photographer from the 1930s, John O. Brostrup, it seems that the day-to-day work was arranged and assigned, but a great deal was also left up to the photographers.
Brostrup, who joined the HABS team in the Washington, DC area in 1936, related that he drove his own car to the sites, with only a scant reimbursement for mileage. He used his own camera, and developed his film in a darkroom in his home. The days were long – but delightful. “It was the Depression time; everything was falling apart!” said Brostrup. “Even the so-called wealthy people were neglecting their homes. That’s why so many of the homes that I photographed have since disappeared. It speaks to the importance of preservation from here on.”
A February 8, 1934 image of a wood-covered Bridge, Spanning Main Licking River, Butler, Pendleton County, KY. Photograph by Theodore Webb.
The HABS photographs are a loud and eloquent voice of preservation, during a time when people had to be more interested in self-preservation than tending to crumbling old buildings. The architects, historians, and photographers (were any of them women?) working for HABS were (though I doubt this was at the forefront of anyone’s mind) blazing a trail for the rest of us.
Possibly one of my favorite of Webb’s photographs – the first floor bedroom in the Governor Lazarus Powell House, Henderson, Henderson County, KY.
During his stint working for HABS, Webb photographed buildings and structures in Bourbon, Jefferson, Harrison, Pendleton, Mercer, Henderson, Nelson, Fayette, Kenton, Green, Franklin, Mason and Woodford counties (and I might have missed one or two). In 1935, Webb was listed as working for the Royal Photo Company in Louisville, which was established by Louis Bramson in 1904 as the Royal Photo View Company.
When he registered for the World War II draft at the age of 41, Webb still lived in Louisville, and worked for Louisville Color Gravure. He was divorced and remarried, and it appears his daughters lived with their mother.
Textile Mill & Storage Warehouse, U.S. Route 60, Grahamton, Meade County, KY. Phtographed on January 31, 1934 by Theodore Webb.
After that, the bread crumbs of Webb’s life become slighter and harder to find. He died in 1976 in Illinois and is buried with his second wife in West Lebanon, Indiana. But provided that the family information I uncovered is accurate, I now have small outline of one of the hundreds of photographers who made the HABS program what it is today.
I am not a professional photographer, and I wouldn’t dare evaluate Webb’s technical prowess against his colleagues – but that year he spent traveling around Kentucky was a pivotal time for our state and its cultural heritage. The labors of these HABS photographers (and architects and historians) led to so many great things and likely changed the path of the historic preservation movement in this country.
*Catherine C. Lavoie, “Laying the Groundwork,” in American Place: The Historic American Buildings Survey at Seventy-Five Years. Exhibition catalog by HABS/NPS, 2008.
**Catherine C. Lavoie, “A Complete Resume of the Builder’s Art,” in American Place: The Historic American Buildings Survey at Seventy-Five Years. Exhibition catalog by HABS/NPS, 2008.
***On a side note, Scottow Studio was owned and operated for 25 years by Bernice Scottow. She was a graduate of the Southern School of Photography and one-time president of the Louisville Photographers’ Association. I can’t help being curious if she wanted to be a HABS photographer…
Remarkable…God Bless large format b/w film photography….now a thing of the past!
Great to know more about these folks.
Thanks!
I had never heard of the HABS project, another wonderful program that helped artists and others during the depression. Is there a list of the properties that were photographed, by county?
Yes, HABS files are digitized and at the Library of Congress website, arranged by Creator/Related Names, Subjects, and Geographic location.
Here is the link to the Geographic list: https://www.loc.gov/pictures/collection/hh/index/places/
Janie-Rice, interesting history of an individual Ky HABS photographer. Thank you!
wonderful article. Thank you very much. Where would we be without HABS/HAER. Tax money well spent both to collect the original data and now to make available via internet.
Fascinating post, Janie Rice. Thank you.
I could talk about HABS for hours. I do not have the time right now, though.
Yes, women did participate in the HABS project, probably commensurate with their participation in the architecture field; so, there were not a lot of them. That being said, the Alabama HABS office was run by the Burkhardts, Walter and Varian. She was arguably the face of the HABS program in Alabama through her writing and publicity. Their partnership is likely the main reason Alabama has one of the best HABS collections in the nation; they surveyed buildings at a rate of one every three days.
I seem to think that I have read how the Alabama HABS functioned, what the “worker bees” did and when they did it. Perhaps Kentucky’s was arranged a bit differently. But, the Burkhardts left reams of information deposited at Auburn University (where he taught), and “Alabama Ante-bellum Architecture: A Scrapbook View” a book published in the 1970s containing a collection of Varian’s 1930s newspaper columns.
On Preservation in Mississippi, we really like HABS, even though Mississippi’s HABS collection was a rather paltry one: https://misspreservation.com/?s=HABS&x=0&y=0.
Janie-Rice,
Your whole account, and the photos you chose to illustrate it, is
FASCINATING ❣️
Many thanks.
Kelly Scott Reed,
Savannah.
I love this article – I love them all but this one was particularly fascinating. The photographs are wonderful – I want to see all of the Kentucky ones. I’m so glad to know about the man who took them. I expect more about other photographers!
Janie-Rice: Well done!
You make an aside above, “(and we usually hate having people in our photographs of buildings)” which is both honest and accurate. Architectural photographers try to eliminate from the frame anything which will date the shot, in the hope that the resulting image makes the building look like a timeless creation, a work of art. No people! No cars! No dogs running loose!
This is an aesthetic choice, and one adopted by architectural historians who must multi-task by becoming their own architectural photographers. Thus the “we” in your parenthetical extends to architectural historians.
The consequence of this aesthetic, though, is that the images captured present dehumanized buildings. This is a problem on two levels, in my opinion, and perhaps yours. On the first level, it’s incongruous with your fine efforts in Gardens to Gables to do just the opposite—to HUMANIZE historic places. It’s okay to create images of architecture bereft of humans, but it’s also acceptable to include images carrying the presence of humans. At the very least, humans in the photos will provide a sense of scale that the sanitized image cannot. Flip back up to the image of the two men talking outside the Kentucky School for the Blind. Would the entrance look quite so monumental without the comparison of a human to the columns? A sense of scale is only one quality that allowing people in the image will accomplish.
The second danger of the dehumanizing aesthetic of architectural photography is that it reinforces the chasm that exists between the public and preservationists. When you hear a person casually refer to “the hysterical society” you know there’s tension. I also know that there exists a parallel sentiment among the preservation community: that if the historic building could just be rid of its misguided owners, it could continue to exist as a perfect abstract creation. The more that historic preservationists fantasize about “taking people out of the picture,” the more they will serve to marginalize themselves as a profession.
That dynamic between the general public and the field of architectural professionals is well served by efforts such as yours, which seeks to imagine the vibrant human condition amid the static materials and spaces.
I look forward to your future posts, and perhaps seeing a few more owners in those shots, or maybe a dog or two who’ve snuck into the frame.