| This is the second episode of One Day in the Life of John B. Roberts, picking up where our Lyons Republican story left off and following a young canal‑town photographer into the years of Lincoln, the Civil War and Frederick Douglass.
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John Benson Roberts was born in 1837 in New York State, the son of William P. Roberts and Disa Benson. In the 1850 federal census, the family appears in Owasco, Cayuga County, in the Finger Lakes region: on lines 4 to 8, John B., 13, is recorded living with his father William, 46, his mother Disa, 32, his sister Lovinia (Velona), 12, and the baby Clemena Axa “Meta”, aged one. Father William is described simply as a “Lumberman,” working in the timber trade. The later local claim that he was a pioneer photographer in Rochester finds no support in the records. Given his trade, it is tempting to imagine William Roberts using his skills as a lumberman to build wooden camera boxes or studio fittings for the first photographers in nearby Rochester. For the moment, however, no document confirms such a role; the story is more likely a confusion with the Boston‑based manufacturers of daguerreotype cameras named Roberts, who were well known at the time.
As a teenager, Roberts lived not far from Auburn, an industrial town tied into the Erie Canal system. Since the early 1840s, Auburn had hosted several active daguerreian studios: Walker & Gavit advertised portraits and views; E. P. Senter and Cornelius B. DeReimer ran galleries and openly offered to take on apprentices. No formal apprenticeship contract for Roberts has survived, but this is the most plausible environment in which the young photographer learned his trade. In the spring of 1860, Roberts suddenly appears along the Erie Canal as a professional photographer. For a short time (two months) he is documented in Palmyra, a canal‑side town best known in religious history as the place of Joseph Smith’s First Vision and the early Mormon revelations.
This engraving, widely circulated in the nineteenth century, evokes Joseph Smith’s First Vision, the foundational scene of Mormonism said to have taken place in the woods near Palmyra. It hints at the kind of religious imagination that already haunted the landscape where Roberts began his career. Shortly thereafter, he moved a few miles east along the Erie Canal to Clyde, in Wayne County, and took over William Hendricks’s Daguerreian Rooms in the Perkins Block, a building that still stands today and allows us to imagine his rooms above the busy storefronts facing the village green.
With a population of about 3,000, Clyde effectively had only one photography studio. Just across from the Perkins Block, lived and worked the young local journalist of about his own age, Thomas Payne. The photographer and the reporter were near‑exact contemporaries and literal neighbors — two ambitious twenty‑somethings watching the same stretch of canal and learning how to turn local life into images and stories. Beginning in April 1860, Roberts advertised in the Clyde Weekly Times as the local photographer for portraits and outdoor views.
During the 1860 presidential campaign, he photographed Horace Greeley when the editor of the New‑York Tribune came to speak in Clyde in October. Greeley’s visit was reported in the Clyde Weekly Times, which noted that he arrived on 19 October 1860 on the mail train from the East and was escorted by the Wide Awakes to the residence of William S. Stow, a leading figure in Clyde’s development and a strong supporter of the Republican Party. As the paper put it, ‘Hon. Horace Greeley arrived here on the mail train from the East on Friday morning, October 19th, 1860, and was escorted by the Wide Awakes to the residence of Wm. S. Stow, Esq. . . . Some of our citizens then invited him to leave his ” shadow” with us for inspection hereafter. This request he also complied with, and Mr. J. B. Roberts, the artist, has, therefore, been enabled to secure a good ambrotype of him’ ( Clyde Weekly Times, 27 October 1860). This was the occasion on which Roberts secured Greeley’s portrait—a rare moment when national politics and a small canal village briefly shared the same stage. A collodion glass negative of Horace Greeley, without credit or date but clearly from the 1860s, is today one of the few surviving images that can plausibly be connected with that lost Clyde ambrotype.
In the end, the 1860 campaign was a clear success in Roberts’s corner of New York: Clyde, Lyons and much of Wayne County voted overwhelmingly for Lincoln and the Republican ticket. Across the Erie Canal region, canal towns that had listened to Greeley’s speeches and read Tinsley’s editorials now helped carry New York State for Lincoln. On 18 February 1861, during Lincoln’s thirteen‑day inaugural journey to Washington, the President‑elect’s train made a brief stop in Clyde in bitterly cold weather. According to local accounts, Lincoln stepped out onto the rear platform of the car to greet the crowd, while a village photographer hastily set up a daguerreian camera on a tripod, perched on top of a pile of lumber along the tracks.
During the Civil War, Roberts printed carte-de-visite portraits of Union soldiers, including posthumous commemorative images commissioned by families. In 1864, he began expanding his operations to Rochester, where he took over B. F. Powelson’s studio, acquiring both the premises and a stock of negatives, notably portraits of Union officers and soldiers.
From this period onward, his prints bear the inscription “Rochester and Clyde.”
These small blue “2 cents Proprietary” stamps are not postage, but Civil War revenue stamps. Between August 1864 and August 1866, the U.S. government imposed a special “sun picture” tax on photographs to help finance the war, and photographers were required to buy revenue stamps and affix them to the backs of their cartes de visite, then cancel them by hand.
As far as we can tell today, this Civil War “sun picture” tax is a unique experiment: a wartime levy aimed specifically at photographic prints, with no true equivalent elsewhere.
Fourth, a small group of Fenian portraits—leaders and activists of the Irish nationalist movement—also carries the Rochester backmark.
J. B. Roberts’s portrait of Fenian militant W. R. Roberts, ca. 1865, shows how his studio briefly intersected with the world of Irish nationalism at the very moment when the Fenian Brotherhood was coming under intense British scrutiny. Roberts’s link to these Fenian portraits is particularly intriguing. Around 1865, Irish nationalism and the Fenian Brotherhood were reaching a new level of visibility, while British authorities were intensifying their repression of nationalist groups. To find a young Republican photographer in Rochester producing portraits of Fenians suggests that his studio was not only a local business but also a crossroads where Union veterans, abolitionists and Irish radicals all came to sit for the camera.
This intuition has recently been confirmed. In 2023, a carte‑de‑visite portrait of Frederick Douglass by J. B. Roberts resurfaced at auction: John B. Roberts, Frederick Douglass, CDV, Rochester, ca. 1867, Freeman’s, Cincinnati, 15 June 2023, lot 237. The mount bears Roberts’s 58 State Street, Rochester imprint and shows Douglass in three‑quarter view, his hair already turning gray, which fits the years when he was still living in the city. Taken together with the Fenian portraits, this carte‑de‑visite of Douglass makes it clear that Roberts’s clientele extended well beyond local canal‑town families.
Following Lincoln’s assassination in April 1865, Roberts joined the wave of commemorative imagery sweeping across the North. The Rochester Evening Express of 10 May 1865 reported that ‘a large sized photograph of the late President, from an original negative by Gardner, Photographer, Washington, from a sitting in February last’ was on view, adding that ‘J. B. Roberts & Co., successors to Powelson, have copies, which have even a finer finish than the original. It is the most truthful picture we have yet seen.’ In this case, Roberts was not the creator of the negative, but the printer and exhibitor: he transformed a Washington portrait into an enlarged print for the public of a provincial city, demonstrating both his technical skill and his ability to position his studio within a national visual culture of mourning. While working in Rochester in 1865, John B. Roberts started a family and married Mary L. Wheeler (1840–1912); the Wheeler genealogy records their marriage on 14 June 1865 and lists three children born in 1866, 1867 and 1868. Around 1868, Roberts’s health began to fail. His practice at 58 State Street appears to have remained active until that year, but he died in Rochester on 30 May 1869, aged thirty‑one years and nine months, after a prolonged lung illness. He is buried in Mount Hope Cemetery, on a monument that also bears the names of George Clark Huntington (1836–1905) and Meta Roberts Huntington (1845–1906); the headstone simply reads ‘John Benson Roberts, 1837–1869.’
Taken together—census returns, family records, the Mount Hope tombstone, obituaries from Clyde and Rochester, and surviving cartes de visite—these elements allow us to identify the Clyde photographer ‘J. B. Roberts’ with John Benson Roberts (1837–1869), son of William P. Roberts and Disa Benson, husband of Mary L. Wheeler. The works we can currently trace are few but telling: studio portraits along the Erie Canal, military and commemorative CDVs in Rochester (and occasionally Albany), at least one portrait of Frederick Douglass, a cluster of Fenian leaders, and the post‑assassination enlargements of Abraham Lincoln that placed his provincial studio inside a national cult of images.
In reproducing here what I believe to be his own self‑portrait—an image in which Roberts quite literally steps into Lincoln’s place before the camera—I am simply following the thread of this fragile reconstruction: a short, intense career in which a young canal‑town photographer tried to leave his mark on the visual memory of the 1860s.
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