Photography genius: George R Lawrence & "The hitherto impossible

Petterchak, Janice

During the early decades of the twentieth century, Chicago photographer George Raymond Lawrence was renowned as an inventor of cameras and innovator of photographic processes. Today, even though his name is virtually lost in photographic history, the genius of George R. Lawrence is recalled in the techniques he perfected and the images he created, many now in private collections and major public repositories.

The Lawrence family descended from John Philip Lorenz, who emigrated from Germany in 1748. George Lawrence, born in Ottawa, Illinois, on February 24, 1868, was the eldest of six children of Margaret Othelia Tritley and Michael B. Lawrence, a LaSalle County farmer and carpenter. Within a few years, the family moved sixty miles east to a Kankakee County farm. In the nearby town of Manteno, George attained an eighth-grade education and the Lawrences attended St. Joseph Catholic Church.1

Among area residents George Lawrence was known as a habitual tinkerer, devising a telegraph system to communicate with friends, making a gun on his own forge, and building sleighs on a metal and woodworking lathe he designed and constructed. He also had a knack for what he called "autonomic" inventions -mechanical devices, including a rudimentary washing machine, for simplifying household tasks.2

At the age of twenty, he moved to Chicago and began working at the Abbott wagon factory in Auburn Park, a suburban area now part of the city. While employed at Abbott, he invented a "sweating" method of attaching iron rims on wooden wheels, a process by which one employee performed the work that previously required the efforts of eight.

In 1890 Lawrence married Alice Herenden, and the following year, after mastering a new hobby of crayon drawings made from photo graphs, he opened The Lawrence Portrait Studio at Yale Avenue and 63rd Street, sharing the space and expenses with photographer Irwin W. Powell. George and Alice became the parents of two sons, Raymond W. and George Lee Lawrence.

When Powell abandoned his business and equipment in 1896, Lawrence learned the basics of darkroom work from a friend and embarked on the career that would define his life. Moving the Lawrence photographic studio to 271 Michigan Avenue about 1901, within three years he relocated to the fourth floor of 300-2-4 Wabash Avenue, at the corner of Van Buren Street in the heart of downtown Chicago. He advertised "The hitherto impossible in photography is our specialty."3

Tall, with a mustache and erect bearing, the energetic Lawrence set about proving the boastful slogan to Chicagoans. From the Wabash Avenue studio, he would over the years highlight his career with four "hitherto impossible" photographic techniques:

"Flashlight Lawrence"

By the late nineteenth century photographers were experimenting with artificial light to enhance their images. In the 1880s, Seneca Ray Stoddard, a noted New York landscape photographer, tried burning magnesium chloride to illuminate outdoor night shots. On his first attempt, photographing the Washington Memorial Arch in New York City, Stoddard sustained burns to his face and hands when the magnesium exploded"but the photograph was entirely successful."4

Photographers using magnesium for indoor photography created volumes of smoke that billowed through the room. And because of the danger of explosion, fire officials banned the use of flash powder at large gatherings. Lawrence, although "knowing nothing of chemistry" began experimenting with various substance combinations, enduring "numerous explosions which burned off his hair, his eyebrows and mustache, and burst his eardrums."5 One of the experiments caused the explosion of a South Side building, but eventually Lawrence developed a magnesium formula "that generated more light and less smoke."6

"In all my life I never started anything I did not finish," he told an associate. The invention earned him recognition as "The Father of Flashlight Photography" for indoor images, along with the nickname "Flashlight Lawrence." The friend described Lawrence as "probably the only specialist in artificial light photography in this country." His powder, ignited from electrical wires imbedded in the charges, provided a brilliant white light. He designed portable towers, on which the charges were connected by electrical circuits. After simultaneous sparks ignited the powder, an umbrella-like canvas bag dropped over the lighting apparatus to collect the smoke. Lawrence had once produced a flashlight photograph in Chicago's huge Coliseum that required twenty pounds of powder. His vastly improved product duplicated the image with only five ounces. This new method not only revolutionized the dangerous field of indoor photography, but also was the forerunner to photographic flashbulbs and floodlights. In a later Lawrence advancement, the flame-forced through a narrow slit-created light in a flat plane, again increasing its effectiveness.7

Beginning about 1900, "Flashlight Lawrence" also designed and developed his own panoramic banquet camera, which was manufactured for him by the G. Cramer Dry Plate Company of St. Louis, Missouri. With earlier panoramic equipment, members of the group being photographed were positioned in an equidistant arc from the rotating camera. Lawrence's panoramic camera incorporated an equalized focal plane, which provided a proportional image of each individual in the group picture. He earned substantial fees traveling the country to photograph banquets, conventions, legislative sessions, and other such assemblies.8

In New York, where flashlight pictures were banned in public places because of the fire hazard, financier J. P. Morgan, Sr. invited Lawrence to demonstrate the "absolute safety" of his method by photographing a large banquet group. The success of his smoke-collecting bags brought an immediate removal of the flashlight prohibition.

In Chicago, officials opposed Lawrence's plan to make a flashlight photograph of a banquet honoring President William McKinley "for fear the place might be wrecked." Lawrence demonstrated to the authorities the safety of his methods, then secured a picture of the event that became one of his most famous images.9

Another of Lawrence's well-known banquet photographs, titled "Secretary Taft's Philippine Party Dinner," was probably taken at the Auditorium Hotel in Chicago on April 9, 1904. Governor of the Philippines William Howard Taft had just returned to begin new duties as Secretary of War for President Theodore Roosevelt." Lawrence was commercially successful using the camera at festivals and other events, as well as photographing factories and neighborhood scenes.

"The Big Camera"

Lawrence's success with panoramic cameras led officials of the Chicago and Alton Railroad to request a single-plate photograph of its new Chicago-to-St. Louis passenger train, the "Alton Limited." To that time, according to a company writer, no railway train in the world had ever presented a design so uniform and symmetrical. No train of cars had ever before been built with windows of the same size, shape, and style from mail car to parlor car; the cars in no train heretofore had all been mounted on standard six-wheel trucks; no former effort had been made to have every car in the train precisely the same length and height; and no railway, except the Alton Road, had ever caused the tender of its locomotives to be constructed to rise to the exact height of the body of the cars following; the hood of its locomotives to the exact height of the roofs of the cars. This gave a fascinating beauty to the train-carrying out of the principal features with classic regularity-the absolute unity of detail from cow-catcher to observation platform. Indeed this was what created, and impelled, the idea to obtain a photograph of the "Limited" sufficiently large to readily impress the public with the train's unprecedented symmetry.11

Lawrence, who had previously photographed some of the railroad line's standard passenger locomotives, "was called into conference" on this project. With existing cameras, he explained, he could make only a series of sectional views and piece them together. Company officials, however, "had built a faultless train of which they demanded a faultless photograph, insisting that in length the picture must not measure less than eight feet."12

Accepting the challenge, Lawrence sought the assistance of local inventor J. A. Anderson. Within eight months they designed and built the "Big Camera," a massive contraption weighed 1,400 pounds and requiring fifteen operators. The bellows extended twenty feet on steel-track wheels. The lenses were reported as the largest ever ground for photographic work-the telescopic rectilinear lens being 11 feet equivalent focus. The 10'x6' plate-holder created 8'x4 1/2' pictures-three times the print size of existing panoramic cameras.13

Other features included light-proof curtains (resembling window shades), which protected the negative before and after exposure. The camera could be adjusted for either upright or horizontal views. The large photographic plate was created by the Cramer Dry Plate Company. "Owing to the dimensions required," wrote a reporter, "it was necessary to provide new apparatus. A great marble slab, larger than the plate, was the first requisite. Upon this the plate is resting while the coating is being applied. Large pieces of ice beneath the slab keep it at a temperature that will cool the emulsion rapidly as it is applied."14 New developing and printing methods were also worked out. The negative plates cost $1,800 per dozen.

In a letter to the editor of Photographic Times, Lawrence's partner, Anderson, described "the largest camera in the world":

This camera is constructed to allow a full exposure of a plate measuring 56x96, and embodies, in its construction, all the improvements an up-to-date camera can have, being reversible, having double swing back, rising and swinging front, and an arrangement for bracing the back that makes it as rigid as the back of a small camera, thus dispensing with any jar or vibration while an exposure is being made.

In the construction of the four bellows-two cone and two square-there was over fifty yards of heavy black rubber sheeting used, and though they allow an extreme focus of fifteen feet, yet so compact were they made, the whole camera can be folded to three feet.

The holder is curtain slide, and although fifty feet of fiveeight inch lumber was used for the slide it was made to work so easily that a boy of fourteen years would have no difficulty in drawing it.

As a ground glass for focusing in this mammoth camera would be clumsy to handle and liable to breakage two frames were made to slide on the back of the camera, and celluloid strips made to fit in these frames, making a very light and satisfactory substitute for the usual ground glass.15

With his camera transported on a special railroad flatcar, Lawrence made the Chicago and Alton photograph at Brighton Park, about six miles from downtown Chicago. "The day was clear but a high wind was blowing, notwithstanding which, after an exposure of two and one-half minutes, on a full Cramer Isochromatic Plate (this special plate being used to preserve the color value of the train), a perfect negative was secured. The picture of The Alton Limited ... was reproduced, without the slightest 'retouching' upon the part of the engraver, from a platinum print."16

Three prints of Lawrence's huge Alton Limited picture were submitted for the Paris Exposition of 1900. One was placed in the railway section, another was hung in the photographic section, and the third was given a place of honor in the United States Government Building, "a liberality of exhibition privileges accorded to no other single exhibit in the entire Exhibition." At first the judges in a photography competition branded the image a "fake" and sent the French Consul General from New York to inspect the camera in Chicago. Convinced of its authenticity, Exposition officials awarded Lawrence their "Grand Prize of the World for Photographic Excellence."

In 1901 Lawrence used the camera for what was termed the "largest half-tone in the world," a 24"x96" picture of Reverend John Alexander Dowie consecrating land for a lace mill at his Zion, Illinois religious colony. Photographic Times reported that Binner Engraving Company of Chicago printed the halftone in two sections "no press being found large enough to print it in one piece.... There were over twenty persons employed in the production of this job. When we take into count those employed by Mr. Lawrence and those by The Sinner Eng. Co., and those in the press room and bindery of the Zion Printing Co., we have a total of about fifty people who worked on the plate in some capacity before the printed sheet was ready for delivery. It is truly a great achievement."17

"Captive Airships"

Well known for his large-format group photographs, Lawrence also began adapting the technology for urban panoramas-adding a system of remote electrical triggers that allowed him to make exposures from such locations as racetracks and baseball parks. His first attempts were from platforms or ladders anchored by guy ropes. Then he designed and built a telescoping tower of more than 200 feet, manipulated by pulleys and ropes. But finding that heavy industrial pollution often prevented clear viewingeven from that vantage, Lawrence commissioned the nationally known Baldwin Brothers firm of Quincy Illinois to construct a gas-filled balloon for taking photographs from still higher elevations.

The first attempt with his "captive" balloon came on June 20, 1901, a flight over the Chicago Union Stock Yards for bird's-eye views of the Armour packing plant. But because of poor quality iron filings mixed with sulphuric acid to generate the gas, the balloon failed to rise to the needed height.

The following afternoon, with "thousands of persons . .. in the yards watching the operations of the aeronaut-photographer," Lawrence made another attempt, the balloon being anchored at Exchange and Center avenues by a rope 1,000 feet long. In place of a basket was a wooden platform, connected by a strong network to a steel frame, from which spread the ropes that were attached to the balloon proper. Lawrence boarded the craft with his camera, and the rope was reeled out gradually until the balloon reached a height of 900 feet.18

In the air for more than an hour, Lawrence took views of the plant from various directions "as the wind swayed the balloon now in one direction and now in another." On the descent, however, the balloon broke from the network of ropes and floated off over Lake Michigan. The platform carrying Lawrence plunged 228 feet, then about fifty feet from the ground struck a network of telephone and telegraph wires, breaking the force of his fall. "The car swerved, righted itself, and then fell to the ground within thirty feet of where the ascent was made. The photographer was unhurt, but his negatives were broken and his camera was badly shaken up."19

Undaunted, Lawrence immediately ordered another balloon from Baldwin Brothers and then made aerial photographs of the American Derby at Washington Park racecourse. He eventually obtained the stockyards pictures, as well as extraordinary views of city developments and sporting events.

Then he accepted an unusual commission to take balloon photographs of Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota, as a circulation-building stunt for the Minneapolis Tribune. But he was caught in a harrowing windstorm above a lake near Stillwater, Minnesota; "the experience [temporarily] cured him of further use of balloons to get spectacular views."20

One day on Chicago's Michigan Avenue, Lawrence observed a kite overhead trailing a large advertising banner. He became intrigued by the concept of cameras being carried skyward on kites. As early as 1895, American photographer William A. Eddy had been taking aerial views from heights of one thousand feet, using a series of unmanned kites launched from building roofs. Lawrence improved on Eddy's technique, constructing kites of various sizes for different wind velocities.21

He developed a harness to balance and suspend a 2'x5' panoramic camera to capture pictures "of what the birds saw."22 At the core of each kite were prisms with triangular bases, and two top and lateral-edged wings formed a seven-foot plane surface. As many as seventeen such kites-contaming safety valves and other features to maneuver through changing wind conditions-were strung on one cable controlled by a stabilizing windlass.

The camera, suspended below the nearest kite on the line, contained complicated rigging to maintain equilibrium. A panoramic lens was positioned below center so that three-fourths of the film, bent in a semi-circular form, captured the landscape, with one-fourth focused on the sky. Electric current through the insulated core of the steelcable kiteline caused the shutter to snap, in turn releasing a small parachute that indicated the picture was made. Then the kites were pulled down and the camera reloaded.23 Seven such cameras, weighing up to one thousand pounds, were constructed for photographs from two to eight feet in length. Lawrence named his new invention the "Captive Airship."

"In all my experiences I never used all of my seventeen kites but once," Lawrence later explained. "Usually ten were enough and often only five or six. They could be attached to the trunk line by harness snaps, two for each kite and a spreader device kept them out from the main line with which they never tangled. If a sudden strong wind should create unmanagable conditions, as happened once in a blinding blizzard near Denver, tension was relieved by a `safety valve' of light cord. This would break and set the refractory unit free to swing around with the wind, although it could not get away."24

With these cameras, Lawrence obtained some of the first aerial pictures of Fort Sheridan (north of Chicago), the cities of Chicago Heights and Waukegan, as well as surveys of irrigation projects and news events. "At the prompting of President Theodore Roosevelt," who had become interested in the possibility of kite photography in wartime, U.S. Army and Navy officers invited Lawrence to demonstrate his system. Accompanied by two assistants, along with cameras, films, and steadying apparatus, Lawrence boarded the USS Maine on August 25, 1905. A team of officers observed and worked with Lawrence for more than two months. According to kite-photography specialist Simon Baker, the officers described the demonstration in a report to the Atlantic Fleet's Commander-in-Chief: "They timed the process from the ascent of the first kite until the camera was landed back on deck as averaging about one hour and a half. They also described the panoramic camera being used as having a 19-inch focal length, producing a 20 by 48 inch plate, and weighing 49 pounds."25

In April of 1906 Lawrence was provided a spectacular subject for his gargantuan apparatus-the San Francisco earthquake and ensuing fire that burned out of control for days. Photographers from all over the world quickly arrived in the ruined city, but few of their views encompassed the scope of the disaster. Lawrence, perhaps commissioned by the San Francisco Examiner, began assembling his equipment and then with five assistants boarded a train for California. Six weeks after the devastation, he sent his seventeen kites flying from a ship in San Francisco Bay with a panorama camera dangling beneath them, described by photographic historian Beaumont Newhall:

It was raining, and the cable became wet; the shutter would not obey his command; and for a while it seemed that his bold project was doomed to failure. But the sun suddenly came out, dried the cable, and from an altitude of 2,000 feet the camera recorded a panorama of the entire extent of the ruined city. Bleak, desolate, and more detailed pictures were taken from lower altitudes with landbased kites. The largest of Lawrence's air photographs of the destroyed city measure 48 by 18 3/4 inches. They are contact prints made directly from the mammoth-the largest yet taken from any airborne vehicle.26

"His camera's innate tendency to bend the space it described mattered little here," reported Peter B. Hales, writing on the history of American urban photography, since the streets were chaotic, the buildings in ruins, the topography a jumble of masonry-strewn hills, smoking wreckage, and downed electrical cables. The fact that he could not include all of the city was a moot point, for little of the city remained in recognizable form. His views, in fact, derive much of their effect from the shock his viewers felt when faced with the ruins his panoramas revealed.

Long after the city had grown too large and complex for the panoramist's enclosing and ordering, Lawrence's views succeeded by attempting no such thing; rather they chronicled (and celebrated) the destruction of the city, as if describing Sodom after its punishment.27

Worldwide sales of the "classic" panoramic picture earned Lawrence some $15,000. One print sold for $8,000 and another to railroad magnate E. H. Harriman for $4,500, who used the picture in Southern Pacific Railroad advertising. In addition, newspaper and magazine publishers bought copies at $125 each.28

Lawrence later related the details of an encounter regarding the photograph "with one of England's most eminent scientists, Baron John W. S. Rayleigh."

Lord Rayliegh told me to my face that my San Francisco picture was a fake .... He said he had been to San Francisco so he knew there was no point out over the bay where a camera could be set up to get such an extensive view. I described my kite system and explained how I had elevated the camera almost half-a-mile above the water front, his opinion to the contrary notwithstanding. I pointed out how this had enabled me to get a view reaching from Ferry House to Twin Peaks and from Golden Gate more than ten miles inland.

Lord Rayleigh listened thoughtfully, then he wanted to know how I got the same depth of lighting in distance as in foreground. His specialty was optics and he said he knew no lens had ever been made that would produce results like that. I agreed with him, because it's true that the average picture covering any large area will be dim in the distance.

I explained, however, that I had a shutter unlike anything anybody had ever thought of. The slot opened four inches at the bottom and one-half inch at the top, thus permitting me to shorttime the foreground where light was good, and expose it eight times as long for distant parts.

We had no filters in 1906 and I could not have used one anyway, since the time exposure required was impossible with bobbing kites. But that shutter explains how I caught the cloud effects with the sun's rays streaming from behind them. And it explains how the light on Twin Peaks is of the same relative intensity as on the sparkling water right below the camera. His Lordship followed this explanation closely, then capitulated. He admitted he had learned something and offered me use of his famous London laboratory any time I needed a place to work in over there.29

Lawrence's images were bringing increasing professional recognition. In 1907, President Roosevelt placed the Chicago photographer in command of an Army and Navy fleet charged with testing his photo techniques for military aerial reconnaissance. During a three-day mock naval battle, he proved the practicality of his "kite" camera in locating an enemy from an altitude of 2,000 feet and distances of twenty to thirty miles. Impressed by the results, the military adopted some of Lawrence' equipment and methods.

Then followed a period of seemingly modern large-scale aerial surveys, commissioned for industrial plants, city organizations, and surveying firms. For that work, Lawrence designed a panoramic camera weighing less than twenty pounds. His bird's-eye views included the Grand Canyon and other mountain locales, the cities of Washington, D.C. and San Jose and Berkeley, California, as well as the business sections and stockyards of Kansas City, Missouri.

In Chicago, Lawrence made aerial photographs of the International Harvester Company and a vast panorama of the University of Chicago from Washington Park on the northwest to 60th Street on the south.30 Lawrence's views of semi-arid areas in Nevada, Utah, Wyoming, and Idaho revealed details of grazing lands, tillable fields, and streams. These bird's-eye photographs were used in advertising, real estate promotion, and the development of irrigation projects.

"The African Balloonograph Expedition"

Turning from his kite survey work in the western states, in 1909 the forty-one-year-old Lawrence again ventured into balloon photography. He collaborated with W. D. Boyce, a Chicago newspaper publisher and wealthy world traveler, to photograph wild animals in the jungles of British East Africa. Lawrence had convinced Boyce to finance and lead the African expedition, where from the air they would take photographs of animals in their natural background "that would not only live for the ages but would also knock the readers of the Boyce papers for a loop."31 Lawrence explained that while a photographer on the ground had only seconds before he would be noticed and the animals would flee, in a balloon he "could take panoramic views to show the herds stretching across the horizon and at his leisure change to another camera better suited for close-ups of individual animals.32

Lawrence brought several cameras, the largest of which held 22"x55" glass plates. Boyce ordered sixty such plates. "With telescopic lenses fitted to this camera I expect to get larger pictures than have ever before been taken," Lawrence told a reporter. "I have great hopes of being able to photograph the lions, elephants, and other animals in their native haunts." Boyce estimated the expedition's cost at $30,000 or more.33

Lawrence's son Raymond joined the "African Balloonograph Expedition," and for a portion of the trip they were accompanied by famed naturalist and taxidermist Carl Akeley and Chicago Tribune cartoonist John T. McCutcheon.

Disembarking at Mombasa, Kenya, the Boyce entourage traveled by train to Nairobi. There, four hundred native porters and four groups of sixteen oxen began carrying through the steaming jungles 28,000 pounds of photographic equipment and supplies, including kite outfits, collapsible towers, and two balloons. Each of the nine white men in the group was assigned three personal servants-a valet or "tent boy," a gun bearer, and an attendant for his horse or mule.

But soon after they arrived in Africa, disagreements surfaced among members of the safari. Some grumbled that Lawrence continually objected to the location of campsites. "It also began to appear that they were never going to find the precisely right place to send up a balloon. First it was too hot. Then they reached the higher altitudes near Lake Victoria, where the temperature was surprisingly cool, dry, and comfortable. And it was too much or not enough wind that held Lawrence back."34

Even Boyce repored the setbacks: "Balloonograph Expedition lost several cameras trying to get flashlight pictures of lions.... We framed up for him to take his own picture. He took it-but when the flashlight powder exploded, instead of rushing away, he charged the flash. All that was left of the camera when we appeared on the scene the next morning wasn't worth picking up."35

Before the expedition disbanded, however, Lawrence was able to secure several unique photographs of jungle life, including a series of flashlight pictures made with two three-lens cameras. Two upper lenses produced small stereopticon pictures, while the lower lens made one larger picture. To lure a jungle beast within camera range, a carcass was planted and a cord connected to the meat with one camera shutter. Devouring the meat, the animal would unwittingly trip the first shutter that fired the flash. The closing movement opened the shutter of the second camera, firing a second flash, which burned the cord to the first camera and closed the second shutter. The negative thus captured the animal "coming and going."36

After his return to Chicago-probably frustrated by the Balloonograph expedition-Lawrence abandoned his photographic career to pursue a longtime interest in aviation. He began building aircraft at a factory on Jefferson Street south of Van Buren, hauling the craft to Fox Lake for testing. Within a few years he held patents for nearly one hundred inventions relating to airplane equipment.37

According to the recollection of his sister Laura, George and Alice's marriage "turned out unhappily and culminated in divorce in 1913."38 Later, while at the Marshall Field store in downtown Chicago to purchase linen fabric for his aircraft, he met Adele Frances "Della" Page. She was a St. Louis native, the daughter of Henry J. Page, an architect and builder. The fifty-year-old George and twenty-two-year-old Della, four years younger than George's son Raymond, were married in 1916.

The newlyweds lived in a boardinghouse, then rented a northside apartment before eventually purchasing a two-story frame home at 1319 Hood Avenue. Clara Antoinette, the first of four daughters, was born in 1917. Her younger siblings were Virginia Lee, Ruth Adele, and Martha Louise Lawrence.

Successful in the aviation field, Lawrence and a partner, Harry S. Lewis, built a prototype closed-cabin flying boat. In addition, Lawrence obtained patents for automobile "starters" to replace hand-cranking, and for air-conditioning and industrial heating equipment.

At home, he continually instructed his daughters to think through a project to completion: "Whatever you need is right at hand. Look around, and you will find it. Don't act until you think it out. Think! Think!" Daughters Clara and Louise remembered that he always followed his own advice.

Each winter he made an ice rink in the back yard of their home, with electric lights strung for nighttime skating by his children and their friends. A summer feature of the home-and a delight to sweltering neighbors-was Lawrence's invention of water-cooled air dispersed into the rooms through ducts built high in the interior walls. Over the years Lawrence maintained a friendship with and admiration for W. D. Boyce, his host on the African trip. The Lawrence home was filled with souvenirs and hunting trophies, including a lion mounted for him by safari companion Carl Akeley. In the mid-1920s, Lawrence bought a small island in the Wisconsin River off the shore of Rhinelander, Wisconsin. Della and their daughters spent summers at "Lawrence Island," with George visiting on weekends.

Within a few years, however, he suffered a debilitating stroke, which prevented him from earning sufficient income to support the family He began a small business analyzing camera lenses, but eventually was forced to sell their home and rent a nearby apartment at 1432 Highland Avenue. On a visit to Lawrence Island with Della, his daughter Clara and her husband, Lawrence became ill and asked to return to Chicago. He died in the apartment on December 15, 1938.

Funeral services were held at St. Gertrude's Catholic Church in Chicago, with burial at St. Joseph Cemetery, Manteno. The survivors included Della, his two sons and four daughters.' Longtime friend H. H. Slawson wrote of Lawrence, "He left behind him a path of photographic achievement that marked him as one of the foremost pioneers in fields distinctive because of their daring and unconventionality."41

The George R. Lawrence studio was acquired by Kaufmann-Fabry Studios, well-known photographers in downtown Chicago for many years.42 Collections of Lawrence photographs are held by the Library of Congress, the Chicago Historical Society, and the Chicago Architectural and Photographing Company.

Notes

1 Author interview with Clara Lawrence and Louise Lawrence Phinney, Glenview, IL, July 10, 1998.

2 Ibid.; Perry R. Duis and Glen E. Holt, "The Fearless George Lawrence," Chicago, Nov. 1978, 258.

3 Chicago Daily Tribune, Sept. 8, 1960, pt. 5, 5.

4 Jeanne Winston Adler, Early Days in the Adirondacks; The Photographs of Seneca Ray Stoddard, New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1997, 106, 130-31.

5 H. H. Slawson, "'Flashlight' Lawrence Lived Dangerously for Photography," American Photography, Nov. 1939, 823.

6 Duis and Holt; Tom Reed, "The '02 Version of the U-2," National Photographer, Aug. 1960, 417.

7 "Photography By Artificial Light," The Inland Printer, Vol. 20 (1898), 367; Slawson, 824.

8 Slawson, 823-4; Duis and Holt. 9 Slawson, 824.

10 Chicago Tribune Grafic Magazine, Oct. 21, 1951, 2.

11 The Largest Photograph in the World of the Handsomest Train in the World, Chicago and Alton Railway advertising brochure, [n.d.] Chicago Historical Society.

12 Ibid.

13 Chicago Tribune, Sept. 8, 1960, pt. 5, 5. 14 Photo Era, Vol. 7 (1901), 117.

15 Photographic Times, Vol. 33 (1901), 43. 16 The Largest Photograph in the World. 17 Photographic Times, 181.

18 Daily Inter Ocean, June 22, 1901, 1; Chicago Tribune, June 22, 1901, 3.

19 Chicago Tribune, June 22, 1901, 3.

20 Slawson, "$15,000 Photograph," Popular Photography, March 1939, 72.

21 Ibid.; Beaumont Newhall, Airborne Camera; The World from the Air and Outer Space, New York: Hastings House, 1969, 42-3.

22 Slawson, "'Flashlight' Lawrence," 826.

23 Newhall, 42-43; Archie H. Jones, "Notes for radio programs on Chicago station WAAF, 1960," Archives & Manuscripts Collections 63:418, Chicago Historical Society.

24 Slawson, "$15,000 Photograph," 72.

25 Simon Baker, "George Lawrence: A Giant in Kite Aerial Photoaravhv," Kite Lines,

Fall 1994, 53-4. 26 Newhall, 43. 27 Hales, 85-7.

28 Chicago Tribune, Sept. 8, 1960, pt. 5, 5; John Drury, "Chicago a la Carte," WMAQ Radio, Dec. 1, 1945, transcript in Chicago Historical Society; Slawson, "$15,000 Photograph," 30.

29 Slawson, "$15,000 Photograph," 72-3.

30 Harold M. Mayer and Richard C. Wade, Chicago: Growth of a Metropolis, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969, 201.

31 While in London preparing for this adventure, Boyce learned of the Boy Scout organization, recently organized by Lord Baden-Powell. After his return to the United States, Boyce in 1910 incorporated the Boy Scouts of America. Harriet Hughes Crowley, "The Great African Safari Bust, Or, How the Boy Scouts Came to America," American Heritage, April 1975, 28-9.

32 Ibid.

33 LaSalle County Journal, July 7, 1909, 3. 34 Crowley, 30.

35 W. D. Boyce, Illustrated Africa, Chicago: Rand McNally & Co., 1925, 491-4.

36 Slawson, "George R. Lawrence," The Complete Photographer, Vol. 6, #34 (1941), article typescript in "George Raymond Lawrence, Supplement file," Chicago Historical Society.

37 Chicago Tribune, Dec. 16, 1938, 32.

38 Laura M. Lawrence to the National Cyclopedia of American Biography, Jan. 31, 1939, copy held by Clara Lawrence.

39 National Photographer, 419.

40 Manteno Historical Society Journal, Fall/ Winter 1991, 2, 8. 41 Slawson, "$15,000 Photograph," 30.

42 Chicago Tribune, Jan. 12, 1961, pt. 5, 1.

Janice Petterchak

Janice Petterchak received a B.S. in Political Studies and M.A. in American History, both from Sangamon State University (now the University of Illinois at Springfield). Beginning in 1973, she held several professional positions with the Illinois State Historical Library and Society: Assistant Executive Director of the State Historical Society, Coordinator of the Congress of Illinois Historical Societies and Museums, Associate Editor of the Illinois Historical Journal, Curator of the Library's Prints and Photographs Collection, and Supervisor of the Historical Markers program. From 1987 through 1995 she was the director of the Illinois State Historical Library. Her responsibilities included administration of the Library's acquisitions, cataloging, reference, and conservation programs. She also conducted original research on subjects in Illinois history, writing articles for conference presentations and for publications. Ms. Petterchak served as project director for National Endowment for the Humanities grants to organize the Library's prints and photographs collection and to survey newspaper collections in Illinois. She also was project director for the sixyear NEH-funded Illinois newspaper cataloging program. She is a past president of the Sangamon County Historical Society and a member of the Society of Midland Authors. Among the several books she has written and edited are Jack Brickhouse: A Voice for All Seasons, and Mapping a Life's Journey: the Legacy of Andrew McNally III. Her biography of W. D. Boyce, founder of the Boy Scouts of America, will be available early next year from Legacy Press. Her accomplishments are listed in Who's Who in America and Who's Who of American Women.

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