Daguerreotype View of Cincinnati

This 120° panoramic image of the Cincinnati riverfront, properly titled Daguerreotype View of Cincinnati. Taken from Newport, Ky. consists of eight full plate (6.5 × 8.5 inches) daguerreotypes and was taken in September 1848 by Porter and Fontayne (although most likely by Porter). It shows a two mile stretch of the Cincinnati riverfront, from the Public Landing to the town of Fulton.

Of the 60 or so boats pictured, 17 can be identified by name.¹ Among its other details (from left to right) are the office of the composer Stephen Foster, a shipping clerk at the time, the twin-towered Christ Church, the Botanico Medical College, the home of Jacob Strader, president of the Little Miami Railroad, St. Philomena’s Church, and the Mt. Adams Observatory. It is the first complete image of the Cincinnati riverfront, the sixth largest city and the largest inland port in the US at the time, and, perhaps more importantly, the earliest known image of inland steamboats.²

Charles H. Fontayne (1814-1901) and William Southgate Porter (1822-1889) were daguerreians with a studio in the Franklin Buildings in Baltimore around 1844-1845. Fontayne left to start a studio in Cincinnati and Porter became sole owner of the Baltimore Gallery on 20 May 1846. Porter experimented with panoramic images and, on 22 May 1848, he produced a seven panel daguerreotype of the Fairmount Water Works in Philadelphia. This panorama is now in possession of the Eastman House. Although there is little in the way of online images, I can tell you that it is not nearly as impressive as the Cincinnati panorama.

Porter soon rejoined Fontayne at his 30 West Fourth Street studio in Cincinnati and in September 1848 they set up their camera on a rooftop in Newport, Kentucky and took this image.³ Their panorama was immediately considered one of the finest daguerreotypes of its kind. In 1849 it won first prize at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia and at the Maryland Institutes’ Exhibition of the Mechanical and Fine Art as well as a prize at the Crystal Palace Exhibition in London in 1851. Here are some details:

Fontayne and Porters partnership dissolved sometime around 1854-1855. In 1855 Fontayne was advertising life-size photographs at a new gallery in Cincinnati. In 1856 he moved to Cleveland and assisted James F. Ryder in making “solar enlargements.” He later invented a high-speed photo printer³ and in 1858 moved to New York City but within the year was back in Cincinnati. Finally, in 1891, he is listed as residing in Passaic, New Jersey. Porter, on the other hand, mostly stayed put. He continued to maintain his studio and gallery in Cincinnati, at various addresses, until 1880, when he moved his studio across the river to Covington, Kentucky:

1. They are (l→r) the Lancaster, the Wave, the Colorado, the Highland Mary No. 2, the Doctor Franklin No. 2, the Gen. Worth, the Embassy, the Car of Commerce, the Daily Line, the Brooklyn, the Orleans, the John Hancock, the Meteor, the Ohio Belle, the Palestine, the Cincinnatus, and the New England.

2. The original plates are now in possession of The Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County. Insanely high-resolution scans of the panorama are available at the The Ohio Memory Project. The PLCHC also maintains an exhaustive online collection of inland riverboat images. N.B. The image shown here was taken from a later series of 8 × 10 film negatives and expertly digitized and reassembled by my Dad, the master photography historian.

3. Based on the boats and buildings, the low water level, the foliage, the shadows, as well as the apparent inactivity on the riverfront, and corroborated by historical boat manifests and construction records, water level data, and local weather reports, Carl Vitz and Capt. Frederick Way suggest that the panorama was taken in the early afternoon of Sunday, 24 Sept 1848 from York Street in Newport. See: Vitz, Carl. “A Cincinnati Daguerreotype.” Address to the Cincinnati Literary Club, 20 Oct 1947.

4. US patent 25,540. Photographic Printing-Machine. Charles Fontayne. 20 September 1859.

19 Dec 2008, updated 6 Jun 2010 ‧ Photography