Fordyce photos preserve past
It’s likely that many Arkansans could find the portrait of a close relative or a direct ancestor among the 25,000 envelopes of photo negatives in the Dallas County Museum’s Alexander Studio collection.
William Sheldon Alexander pioneered photography in south Arkansas. He first came to the Fordyce area around 1880, a few years prior to it becoming an incorporated city. Alexander began a variety store in the town beside the newly laid railroad and took up photography as an after-hours past time.
Riding his bicycle around the community, he documented the development of the fast-growing town and its early industry. In addition, riding the rails from place to place, his early images captured how other villages in surrounding counties appeared in their infancy. Those photos include sawmills, logging camps, dry goods stores and the persons who populated the places he visited.
Early in the 1920’s, Alexander opened a small studio on Spring Street. By 1927, his operation had grown to the point of needing to relocate to a more prominent masonry structure on Fordyce’s Main Street. Rather than transport his early glass negatives to the new studio, he buried them in his yard on Spring Street. The studio was in business on Main until closing in 1964.
Married in 1887, the elder Alexander raised three children in the photography trade. Oldest daughter Justine, worked with her father until going into the insurance business with the famed A.B. Banks Home Insurance Co. His son, Ray, worked alongside his father from 1945 until 1948. At her brother’s departure, youngest daughter, Faye, who had studied photography at Winona Lake, Ind., came into the business and ran it until closing in 1964.
The collection contains wedding parties, graduations, proms, Redbug and surrounding area football and basketball teams, homes, roadside stores, every train engine that serviced the region, busy Main Streets and countless portraitures covering seven decades of early 20th century life in south Arkansas. Street scenes range from horse-and-buggy days to an assortment
of automobiles with the evolution of the combustion engine, from earliest Model-T’s to 1960 vintage.
It’s not unusual to see older folks visit the well-preserved files of the museum to recapture a bit of their youth from portraits they sat for in childhood, teenage and young adulthood.
DALLAS COUNTY’S COLLECTION
Dallas County Museum founder and former director Agnes Wynne Phillips explained how the collection came into their possession.
“At some point after the studio closed, local artist and picture framer Ralph Poole purchased the remaining photo files and used them to make wonderful reprints of scenes from early days in Fordyce,” Phillips said.
“In the summer 0f ’97 our museum had a building and $500 in the bank and not much else. Fordyce Chamber of Commerce Director Barbara Finley called one morning and asked if I knew they were auctioning off the Alexander Studio negative collection in Ralph Poole’s estate sale,” she said.
Phillip and her husband arrived at the auction just as the negatives were going on the block.
“It was a fantastic repository of portraits from several surrounding counties in a time when everyone had their picture taken,” she said.
The bidding started and a man seemed intent on getting the collection.
“When it got to $250, I told my husband we had better stop before we spent all the museum’s money. When the competing bidder overheard me explaining we were trying to purchase them for the museum, he agreed to stop and we purchased the entire lot for half the museum funds. We carted off 26 file boxes.”
The negatives were arranged in chronological order by month and year.
“We carried Alexander’s lifetime of work to the Chamber office where it sat until a group of helpful ladies began meeting twice a week filing negatives in a more manageable alphabetical order. We now have eight four-drawer filing cabinets filled with negatives stored in our large bank vault room,” she said.
“A pair of our museum board members from Sparkman, Bill and Royce Sorrells, took a great interest and purchased all the dark room equipment to develop the photos. They suggested we keep all the negatives in their original envelopes. The state conservator caught wind of our project and came down from Little Rock to see what we had. They agreed with keeping the negatives in original envelopes but they should also be placed in conservation paper envelopes. They also recommended we rotate opening the drawers once a month to allow them to air out,” Phillips said.
“After 20 years, they continue to be a source of income for the museum. There is a catalog atop the file cabinets that contains names of all the families and individuals to be found,” she said.
In addition to the extensive negative files, Alexander’s widow, Dorothy, gave the museum her husband’s wheel-mounted camera-stand that he used during his photographic career.
“Those of us who had pictures made at the studio will recall how Mr. Alexander would get behind the bulky camera, throw a black cover over his head and roll his contraption around until he got the shot and the expression he was looking for,” Phillips said.
Bill Sorrells is still doing the print work.
“When people pick out the prints they’d like from the collection, the museum mails the negatives to us and I produce 5x7 prints for $5 each. Larger 8x10 prints are a little more because of the additional expense of materials. I’m hoping we can convert the negatives to digital at some future date,” Sorrells said.
The museum is open Thursday and Friday, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., and Saturday, 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Tax deductible donations may be made to the Dallas County Museum, P.O. Box 703, Fordyce, Ark., 71742.
Details: Dallas County Museum, (870) 352-5262 and their monthly newsletter on Facebook.