This is a guest blog post by Eliza Anderson, a recent graduate of Fordham University, where she earned a B.A. in History and French and Francophone Studies. Eliza is a 2025 Buchanan Burnham Fellow.
In 1988, a box of photographs of largely unidentified Black men, women, and children from the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries was discovered in the attic of 75 Callender Avenue and donated to the NHS.[1] The origins of this collection, containing daguerreotypes, one tintype, and cabinet cards from studios in Newport, Boston, New York, New Jersey, and Virginia, have remained a mystery because of the lack of identifying inscriptions. However, small clues to the identities of some of the subjects can be found scattered throughout the collection. In particular, Florence Jackson Jenkins, whose name appears multiple times on the backs of the photographs, arises at the center of a story about Black Newporters in the Gilded Age and the early twentieth-century, and the importance of photography in preserving visual family histories.
A cabinet card labeled “Miss Florence Jackson,” circa 1900. The photo was produced by the Rankin Studio at 142 Thames St. Collection of the Newport Historical Society, P279.
The photographs in this collection were produced as a result of the rising accessibility of portrait photography in the late nineteenth-century, allowing Black Americans to own their own likenesses for the first time. Though the practice began in the 1830s with the invention of the daguerreotype, it wouldn’t be until about 1860 that photography became a truly commercial enterprise.[2] New formats replaced daguerreotypes as the primary photographic techniques and opened the medium to a wider consumer base. In particular, cartes-de-visite and cabinet cards, which were albumen prints mounted on heavy card stock that could be produced cheaply and with multiple copies, ushered in the democratization of portraiture.[3] Abolitionist Frederick Douglass was optimistic about the accessibility of photography, declaring in 1861 that “Men of all conditions may see themselves as others see them. What was once the exclusive luxury of the rich and great is now within reach of all. The humbled servant girl whose income is but a few shillings per week may now possess a more perfect likeness of herself than noble ladies and court royalty, with all its precious treasures could purchase fifty years ago.”[4] Late nineteenth-century photography thus made portraiture, previously the domain of only the wealthiest, a medium available for all.
A daguerreotype of Frederick Douglass, circa 1855. In addition to being a prolific abolitionist, Douglass was an early theorist of photography. He saw the medium as a powerful tool for Black social and political liberation and became one of the most photographed figures of the nineteenth century. From the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2001.756.
The original owners of 75 Callender Avenue, the property where the box of photographs was discovered, were Thomas L. Jenkins (1878-1945) and Florence (Jackson) Jenkins (1876-1966).[5] Thomas, a native of Virginia who moved to Newport as a young man, built the house in 1905, a year after he had married Florence Jackson, the daughter of Andrew and Catherine (Carter) Jackson. The Jacksons had also moved to Newport from Virginia. The house was passed to Florence upon Thomas’ unexpected death in 1945, and she continued to live there until her own death in 1966, at which point the house was passed to a cousin-in-law from Baltimore.[6] The Jenkins’ never had children, but they did live alongside family members like Florence’s father, who resided with them on Callender for several years, and cousin Henry Carter, who lived next door at 71 Callender.[7]
A cabinet card with a handwritten note on the verso reading, “To sister Florence, from Nanie, ‘95.” Collection of the Newport Historical Society, 88.4.22.
A close inspection of the few inscriptions reveals these photographs to be linked to Florence’s family and Newport community. The clearest message can be found on the back of a cabinet card picturing a young Black girl in a high-necked dress with puffed sleeves.[8] The photograph, produced by the Holloway studio of Newport, bears the message, “To sister Florence, from Nanie, ‘95.” Census data reveals that Florence had three siblings — Edward, Cornelius, and Mary — all of whom lived in Newport at the turn of the century.[9] Other inscriptions build a larger map of Florence’s community as a child, pointing to cousins and neighbors both in Newport and elsewhere. One cabinet card depicting a young Black man with a mustache and morning coat, produced by the Dana & Hastings studio of Newport, has the inscription, “Mrs. Jackson 67 Norris.”[10] The “Mrs. Jackson” likely refers to Florence’s mother, who died before 1900. While the number “67” remains elusive, the surname “Norris” offers a possible identification for the man in the photograph. Census data reveals that by 1900, there was man named Callor B. Norris boarding at 71 Callender Ave with Henry Carter, Florence’s cousin.[11] While the exact nature of his relationship to the Carter/Jackson family is unknown, his photograph in Florence’s collection highlights his proximity to Florence’s mother, and to Florence herself, who would become his neighbor at 75 Callender in 1905.
A cabinet card with a handwritten note on the verso reading, “Mrs. Jackson 67 Norris.” The man pictured is possibly Callor B. Norris, who was linked to Florence’s cousin Henry Carter and was her neighbor on Callender Avenue for some years. Collection of the Newport Historical Society, P9716.
Cabinet cards sent from outside of Newport also speak to the relationships between Florence’s family members, and to the new forms of communication offered by photography. Florence’s collection contains three duplicate photographs of a young child named Henry A. Baldwin, produced by a photography studio in Jersey City, New Jersey.[12] Two of the photos bear inscriptions to different family members, one to “Aunt Mary Carter” and the other to “Aunt Kitty.” “Aunt Mary” could refer to Henry Carter’s wife, Mary, who lived with him at 71 Callender, and “Kitty” possibly refers to Catherine Carter Jackson, Florence’s mother. The presence of these cards from New Jersey in Florence’s collection highlights how photography extended the visual family tree across geography.
A cabinet card depicting Henry A. Baldwin in 1895, taken in Jersey City, New Jersey. The photo and its duplicates were likely addressed to Florence’s family members in Newport. Collection of the Newport Historical Society, 88.4.9.
Beyond the few that bear identifying information, the rest of the photographs document late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Black individuals, both young and old, in studio settings which sought to replicate the bourgeois backdrops of painted portraiture. Babies appear in christening gowns, marking an important milestone, and multiple subjects don military uniforms. Young men appear in three-piece suits, and many of the women wear formal dresses and elaborate hats. The period covered by the photographs in the collection spans from around 1880 to 1925, a time when Newport’s Black population was a thriving and diverse subsect of year-round residents, seasonal workers, and summer tourists. While the Gilded Age in Newport is primarily remembered for the social activities of wealthy white ‘society’, there also existed a vibrant community of middle-class and elite Black Newporters. Typical pathways to middle-class lifestyles were restricted for Black residents, who were not typically hired to work in the mansions and were severely underrepresented in managerial positions. However, middle-class and elite communities were formed by Black Newporters who worked as stewards, headwaiters, chauffeurs, business owners, and professionals, some of whom were college educated. Local and national organizations served as important sites of community support, including a chapter of the National Negro Business League, and fraternal organizations like the Grand United Order of Odd Fellows.[13] Many of Florence’s male relatives, who worked primarily as laborers, were members of the Canonchet Lodge of Odd Fellows.[14] Black women also played important roles in Newport organizations, perhaps most notably as part of the Women’s Newport League founded by Mary Dickerson in 1896.[15] When W.E.B. Du Bois and Thomas J. Calloway curated an exhibition on the “American Negro” at the 1900 Exposition Universal in Paris, they included three photographs of the Women’s Newport League to illustrate the state of racial progress in the United States.[16]
A photograph depicting five officers of the Women’s Newport League, circa 1899. The photo was displayed, alongside two others related to the League, at the “American Negro” exhibit at the 1900 Paris Exposition. From the Library of Congress.
While the majority of the photographs in the collection were taken when Florence was a child, she and her husband would go on to become pillars of the Newport Black community throughout the early 20th century. Thomas was a trustee and teacher at Mt. Olivet Baptist Church, and the couple later served as deacons and trustees at Shiloh Baptist Church.[17] Florence and Thomas are both listed as charter members of the Newport branch of the NAACP in 1919, alongside figures like Armstead Hurley, who owned one of Newport’s most prospering painting businesses, and M. A. Van Horne, the son of the first Black member of the Rhode Island General Assembly.[18] Florence was actively involved with the Women’s Newport League, serving as treasurer, hosting meetings, and attending conferences in Providence for the Rhode Island Association of Colored Women’s Clubs.[19] Thomas served as the secretary and treasurer of the Newport Youth Federation, helping to establish recreational sports leagues for Black churches, scholarship funds and educational forums, annual field days, and speaker events.[20] He was also a member of the Canonchet Lodge of the Grand United Order of Odd Fellows, and Florence was active in the women’s auxiliary groups of the Household of Ruth and the Order of the Eastern Star.[21] The lives of Florence and her husband were dedicated to the fostering and betterment of Newport and its Black residents, serving as meaningful examples of the impact of community organizing and the vitality of the Newport Black community in the early twentieth-century.
Florence’s photographs represent a critically important record, significantly widening the scope of the visual history of Black Newporters in the NHS collections. The NHS only has a few other nineteenth-century photographs of Black subjects, including one of Edward Mitchell Bannister (1828-1901), a landscape painter who was one of the few Black American artists to achieve renown in the nineteenth-century, and a copy of a (1819-1903), the activist and successful Newport businessman who fought for the desegregation of Rhode Island schools.[22] While such photographs help to illustrate the elite Black individuals living and working in Newport during the Gilded Age, they depict people who are already considered notable in Rhode Island and American history. The photographs in Florence’s collection, however, highlight Newporters that cannot be found in the newspapers or celebrated in biographies, but who nonetheless form an essential part of a thriving community in Newport at the turn of the century.
[1] Florence Jackson Jenkins Collection (previously the Abarno Collection), 88.4, Collection of the Newport Historical Society, Gift of Richard Abarno.
[2] For more information on daguerreotypes, the Library of Congress has a useful resource: https://www.loc.gov/collections/daguerreotypes/articles-and-essays/the-daguerreotype-medium/. For information on the intertwined histories of daguerreotypes and scientific racism, see Brian Wallis, “Black Bodies, White Science: The Slave Daguerreotypes of Louis Agassiz,” The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, no. 12 (1996): 102–6, https://doi.org/10.2307/2963000.
[3] Donna M. Wells, “Visual History and African American Families of the Nineteenth Century,” Negro History Bulletin 59, no. 4 (1996): 19–21; Rachel Teukolsky, “Cartomania: Sensation, Celebrity, and the Democratized Portrait,” Victorian Studies 57, no. 3 (2015): 462–75, https://doi.org/10.2979/victorianstudies.57.3.462.
[4] Frederick Douglass, “Pictures and Progress: An Address Delivered in Boston, Massachusetts, on December 3, 1861,” https://frederickdouglasspapersproject.com/item/9106.
[5] 75 Callender Avenue house history, NHS library files.
[6] Ibid.
[7] Newport City Directory, 1910.
[8] Florence Jackson Jenkins Collection, 88.4.22, Collection of the Newport Historical Society.
[9] United States Census, Rhode Island, 1900.
[10] Florence Jackson Jenkins Collection, P9716, Collection of the Newport Historical Society.
[11] United States Census, Rhode Island, 1900.
[12] Florence Jackson Jenkins Collection, 88.4.9 and duplicates, Collection of the Newport Historical Society.
[13] Myra Beth Young Armstead, Lord, Please Don’t Take Me in August : African Americans in Newport and Saratoga Springs, 1870-1930 (Urbana : University of Illinois Press, 1999), 81-93.
[14] Newport City Directories, 1904 and 1915.
[15] Armstead, Lord, Please Don’t Take Me in August, 126.
[16] Rebecka Rutledge Fisher, “Cultural Artifacts and the Narrative of History: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Exhibiting of Culture at the 1900 Paris Exposition Universelle,” Modern Fiction Studies 51, no. 4 (2005): 741–74.
[17] Newport Mercury, January 18, 1918: 6, https://www.newspapers.com/article/newport-mercury-and-weekly-news-tom-a-tr/175337959/; ”Thomas Jenkins,” June 8, 1915, NHS Obituary Files; ”Mrs. Jenkins,“ July 14, 1966, NHS Obituary Files.
[18] Armstead, Lord, Please Don’t Take Me in August, 53, 56, 106.
[19] Newport Mercury, December 21, 1928: 5, https://www.newspapers.com/paper/newport-mercury-and-weekly-news/13313/; April 28, 1944: 7, https://www.newspapers.com/article/newport-mercury-and-weekly-news-both-at/175338607/; November 3, 1944: 4; https://www.newspapers.com/article/newport-mercury-and-weekly-news/175337513/.
[20] Newport Mercury, November 25, 1938: 1, https://www.newspapers.com/article/newport-mercury-and-weekly-news/175391533/.
[21] ”Thomas Jenkins,” NHS obituary files; ”Mrs. Jenkins,” NHS obituary files.
[22] ”Photograph of Edward Mitchell Bannister at Battery Park,” circa 1887, P39, Collection of the Newport Historical Society, https://collections.newporthistory.org/Detail/objects/2639; ”Photographic copy of an original photograph depicting George T. Downing and his family,“ circa 1885-1895, P5172, Collection of the Newport Historical Society, Courtesy of the Rhode Island Black Heritage Society, https://collections.newporthistory.org/Detail/objects/1655.