{"id":2043,"date":"2016-06-26T14:00:52","date_gmt":"2016-06-26T14:00:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-288pinsker\/?p=2043"},"modified":"2020-02-25T13:32:01","modified_gmt":"2020-02-25T13:32:01","slug":"first-photo-of-dickinson-secession-winter-1861","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-288pinsker\/2016\/06\/26\/first-photo-of-dickinson-secession-winter-1861\/","title":{"rendered":"First Photo of Dickinson, Secession Winter, 1861"},"content":{"rendered":"

According to the College Archivist, this may well be the very first preserved photograph of Dickinson College –at least the earliest one that can be accurately dated.<\/p>\n

\"Old<\/a>There are several early photographs of West College (above) and East College that have been loosely attributed to the 1860s, but this striking image of Dickinson\u00a0students standing in front of Old West most definitely comes to us straight out of the secession\u00a0crisis from early 1861. \u00a0We can identify the date of this image with some precision as being either in February or March of that year, because of a few tell-tale clues. \u00a0First, the circular window near the crest of the front roof contains damage from a snowball fight that had occurred in December 1860.<\/p>\n

\"Snowball\"<\/p>\n

It was then College Librarian and noted historian Charles Coleman Sellers<\/a> who first observed this detail when he wrote a note thanking the family of William Henry Zimmerman<\/a> (Class of 1861) after they had\u00a0donated the photograph to the college\u00a0in the 1950s. \u00a0At the time, Sellers concluded this detail “probably”\u00a0suggested a composition sometime in spring 1861, “since broken panes in the attic window indicate that the snowball damage of the previous season has not yet been repaired.”<\/p>\n

Yet Sellers was surely being too cautious. \u00a0The state of foliage on the trees (mostly bare, but with some early buds), coupled with the various types of colder weather\u00a0dress by the students,\u00a0makes February or March 1861 the obvious timing for the photograph. In\u00a0other words, this should be considered an iconic image capturing\u00a0a group of nearly\u00a0two dozen young men, about half northern and half southern in their origins, right in\u00a0the middle of the nation’s secession crisis and just before the outbreak of the Civil War in April 1861.<\/p>\n

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