Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,958
By This is the grave of Alexander Hesler.
Born in 1823 in Montreal, Hesler grew up in Quebec and then Vermont, before his family moved to Racine, Wisconsin in around 1833. He worked as a clerk. Later Based in Illinois, he began to experiment with the new art of photography. At first this was daguerrotypes and ambrotypes but by the 1850s, he was working in glass plate photography. He became locally known for producing both portraits and early landscape scenes, which are super useful for getting a better sense of the Midwest in the 1850s than other sources can provide. He became the go-to guy for politicians wanting to spread their image around. In Illinois, that meant working for both Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas.
In short, it is Hesler’s work we are often seeing when we look at photographs of Lincoln, especially those made before he went to Washington. For example, this image from 1860:
Hesler remained a significant figure in American photography through the 1870s, when his work was shown at the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia in 1876. Supposedly, a daguerrotype that Hesler took of Minnehaha Falls in Minneapolis inspired Henry Wadsworth Longfellow to write “Hiawatha.” Sounds apocryphal to me, but who knows, He eventually opened a studio in Evanston, Illinois, where he took a lot of pictures of Northwestern students. They paid.
Hesler lived in Evanston for the rest of his life and died there in 1895. He was 71 years old. He’s not that exciting, but someone had to take the iconic photographs of 19th century politicians and he’s worth a quick profile in the grave series to discuss that little but significant piece of American history.
Alexander Hesler is buried in Mound Cemetery, Racine, Wisconsin.
If you would like this series to visit other 19th century photographers, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Thomas Askew is in Atlanta and Alfred Hart is in Sacramento. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.