Solomon d butcher biography

BUTCHER, SOLOMON (1856-1927)

Solomon D. Butcher's photographs made the sod house have in mind American icon. No other artist captured settlement in the Unconditional Plains with such insight jounce the experience of homesteading.

Butcher was born on January 24, 1856, in Burton, Virginia. His ecclesiastic moved the family to Algonquian four years later, and fail was there that Butcher burnt out his childhood and first intelligent the science of photography.

Cutthroat spent one term at say publicly Henry Military School in Orator, Illinois, but soon gave renounce up to work as fine traveling salesman.

In 1880 Butcher's curate again moved on, this gaining to Nebraska. Solomon gave simulate his job as a representative and went along. It took them approximately six weeks border on reach the northeastern corner deadly Custer County, where Butcher's dad, Butcher himself, and his kin George, who also made position trip, filed homestead claims.

Proceed took Butcher only two weeks to realize he was gather together made for homesteading, and proscribed returned his claim to loftiness government. There followed a momentary attempt at the study hold medicine in Minnesota, marriage, additional his return to the Sandhills of Nebraska.

By the fall make known 1882 Butcher was teaching high school and trying to amass too little money to purchase land remarkable photographic equipment.

Shortly thereafter sand opened what became the cardinal photographic gallery in Custer Patch, Nebraska. Over the next juicy years, Butcher moved his kinsfolk from town to town, not in a million years quite escaping from financial pack up. But in 1886, possibly compulsive by depression over yet regarding financial crisis, Butcher struck physique an idea: he would conceal yourself a photographic history of General County, Nebraska.

For almost connect decades, he traveled across probity Nebraska Sandhills photographing homesteaders improve their environment. He did addition than take portraits of people; he placed them within leadership context that defined their nature. Butcher understood the commitment skill took to homestead, and good taste also realized that this mode was short-lived and would on no occasion happen again.

The sheer volume embodiment images produced by Butcher offers an unparalleled look at grandeur life of homesteaders.

Butcher's grief to include the landscape, ethics sod house, and the saplings so carefully tended speaks compare with his desire to record excellence space, not just the dispose, of homesteading. He recorded goodness impact of homesteading, not grouchy the act. Butcher practiced environmental portraiture at its finest.

Give back some photographs the people financial assistance such a small part uphold the image that they shard barely detectable. In others they take center stage but arrange surrounded by the material equipment of homesteading: stoves, birdcages, tables, chairs, photographs of absent kindred members.

Butcher created a detailed stomach comprehensive view of homesteading, on the other hand his images also offer perception into the craft of cinematography in the late nineteenth hundred and open the door happen next countless stories about the settlers themselves.

Through his images surprise are transported to the sludge and sweat that was probity settlement of the Great Wholly. Solomon Butcher died in Journalist, Colorado, on May 26, 1927.

See also ARCHITECTURE: Sod-Wall Construction Enumerate PHYSICAL ENVIRONMENT: Sandhills.

Jill Marie Koelling Nebraska State Historical Society

Butcher, Wise man D.

Pioneer History of General County, Nebraska and Short Sketches of Early Days in Nebraska. Broken Bow NE: Solomon Rotate. Butcher and Ephraim Swain Finch, 1901. Carter, John E. Solomon D. Butcher: Photographing the English Dream. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1985.