EYE ON HISTORY

BY SANDRA THURLOW | PHOTOS BY HARRY E. HILL

History is one of those things that can disappear forever if no one is watching out for it. There needs to be somebody — a professional historian, a journalist — a beekeeper? — to keep it alive.

Usually it’s the historian or the journalist who does the job for a community, but the Treasure Coast was lucky enough to have a particularly talented beekeeper whose skills ran to more than making honey. Indian River, St. Lucie, and Martin counties can thank Harry Hill, an apiarist — that’s a beekeeper — extraordinaire and a former Canadian, for preserving a substantial slice of the area’s heritage.

Hill may not have considered himself a historian — it’s possible he didn’t consider history much at all — but he had the imagination to wed his vocation with photography, a technical marvel of the late Nineteenth Century and a perfect medium for upgrading the beekeeping magazine he was editing. Eventually the magazine folded, but by that time Hill had perfected his photographic skills and had started a family business that was to become the source of a chunk of Treasure Coast history. He called it the Florida Photographic Concern.

Hill started out taking pictures for the fun of it, as an amateur photographer. But later, first with The American Bee Keeper and later with the Photographic Concern, he was doing it for the money. And he must have made quite a lot. The Florida Photographic Concern became famous for its great photos, fashionable post cards and commissions from foreign countries like Japan.

MORE THAN BEES

From the mid-1890s until the mid-1930s, Hill photographed a lot more than bees. He aimed his cameras at people, what they were doing, what they built. The region’s leaders were usually preserved on his glass negatives, but so were the ordinary people as they went about their ordinary lives. He promoted local industries and photographed the construction of buildings, roads, bridges, railways and canals. He photographed conveyances of all kinds — ox carts, automobiles, trains, boats. He photographed rivers and streams before civilization “improved” them, and he recorded the abundance being harvested from Treasure Coast land and water.

Hill’s photography provided him and his family with a living, but he was not simply a craftsman for hire. He was also an artist who loved to capture the beauty of Florida’s plants and flowers, its fruits and its undersea corals. He specialized in photographing cloud formations and nature scenes. He was a jokester whose trick photography “captured” ghostly visitors and spaceships. So who was this remarkable man? What brought him to the Treasure Coast from way up north in Canada?

THE EARLY YEARS

Hill was born on August 9, 1869, in Port Burwell, Ontario, on the shore of Lake Erie. In 1884, when he was 19, he became a U.S. citizen and settled in a Pennsylvania town called Titusville — no relation to the Florida city of the same name — just a short boat ride across Lake Erie.

Five years later, he married an American named Kate Nelson. They moved to Florida in 1897 and established an apiary on the North Fork of the St. Lucie River in the sparsely settled community of Spruce Bluff. There, the bees made honey and Harry edited The American Bee Keeper and took pictures. Photos were not standard fare in the magazines of the time, so when Harry added lots of them to The Bee Keeper, he was breaking ground. Readers liked them, and Hill appeared on his way to prosperity. By 1904, Hill had purchased the home and studio on North Second Street in the Edgartown section of Fort Pierce. The home and studio, which still stand, are across the street from the historic Platts-Backus house.

IMPORTANCE OF PHOTOS

Already an amateur photographer, Editor Hill realized that the appeal of The American Bee Keeper would be greatly enhanced with the addition of photographs. At the time, few publications included photographs. He encouraged other amateur photographers to submit photographs and began using more and more of his own photographs to illustrate magazine articles. By 1901, Hill was selling cameras and typewriters. In the April issue he wrote, “If any reader of The Bee Keeper is contemplating the purchase of a photographic outfit or a writing machine, I should be pleased to have him correspond with me before placing an order for either. I am in a position to offer new instruments of the highest grade, direct from the manufacturer, at the lowest possible prices.”

In September 1904, Perry Corell, a professional photographer in Titusville, Penn., sold his business and moved to Florida with his wife and young son to enter into a partnership with Harry. In 1904, Perry and his wife, Edna, purchased a quarter acre of Harry Hill’s Edgartown property. No doubt, Corell helped Harry develop as a professional photographer, but by September 1907 he had sold his Fort Pierce property and was living once again in Titusville.

CHANGE IN DIRECTION

Shortly after Perry Corell joined him in Florida, Harry Hill began calling his photography business “The Florida Photographic Concern.” A St. Lucie Tribune article published Aug. 25, 1905, announced the installation of the recently patented “Cirkut” camera. The article ends: “Fort Pierce is doubtless the first town in Florida to install a Cirkut camera, but the steadily increasing business of the Florida Photographic Concern and its determination to lead, and not to follow, in things photographic, are responsible for this innovation on the East Coast. This firm has already had orders for panoramic views of the chain of Florida East Coast hotels which, when finished in the colors of nature, will surpass by ‘long odds’ anything heretofore produced in the line of advertising our popular East Coast resorts.”

One of Hill’s biggest commissions at the time came from a fellow named Henry M. Flagler. The oil and railroad tycoon made Hill the official photographer for his Florida East Coast Oversea Extension, the rail line to Key West. Flagler liked Hill’s work, and on April 23, 1907, he wrote the photographer to say so: “the album containing two hundred views thus far taken along the Key West Extension of the F. E. C. Ry, has given me entire satisfaction.”

With all of the orders coming into the Florida Photographic Concern other family members had to take on more responsibilities. No one in Fort Pierce other than Harry and his brother Fred, listed “photographer” as their occupation in the 1910 U. S. Census. After Perry Corell’s departure, the Florida Photographic Concern was primarily a family affair. Harry’s wife, Kate, and his brother, Fred, maintained the business when Harry was fulfilling his obligations to the Florida East Coast Railway. Even before he was old enough to hold a camera, Lowell Hill was part of the family enterprise.

BOOMING BUSINESS

By the time The Bee Keeper ceased publishing in 1908, Hill’s photography business was booming. “FIRM BECOMES FAMOUS,” trumpeted the St. Lucie Tribune in August 1908. “Today the art prints of the Florida Photographic Concern are on sale in the art shops of nearly every state in the Union, and shipments have recently been made to Alaska and foreign countries.” Hill became an internationally renowned photographer, but his enduring legacy is the thousands of images he captured close to his home in Florida.

“What the Hills did best was to show that people in our area in years past lived very much like we do today,” said Brynn Batsche, educational director for the St. Lucie County Regional History Center, which houses a large collection of Hill photos. “They enjoyed fun times at the beach, went through hardships such as hurricanes, loved their children and pets, went shopping and worked hard. These aren’t stale, cold pictures. These are pictures of people living their lives just as we do.”

FOCUS ON POST CARDS

A valuable segment of Hill’s work is his images of the Cow Creek Indians who lived southwest of Fort Pierce and frequently came into town. Among the subjects of his portraits were the legendary Polly Parker, “The Evangeline of the Seminoles,” and Billy Bowlegs III. A group portrait of Bowlegs, his sister Lucy and Lucy’s daughters, Anna and Ada, appeared on a number of postcards published by various publishing houses.

The History Center owns a glass negative taken at the same time with a slightly different pose. A Hill photo album recently sold on eBay contains a photograph of Billy, his sister and his nieces walking down Second Street after their photo session at the Hill studio.

The Cow Creek Seminoles produced not only the leaders of today’s Brighton Reservation, but those in today’s Hollywood Reservation. Betty Mae Jumper, the first formally educated Florida Seminole and the most decorated member of the Seminole tribe of Florida, descended from the Cow Creek Indians. Her mother was the daughter of the legendary Chief Tom Tiger.

Hill sold many of his photographs to postcard publishing companies in Palatka and Jacksonville, and his images are among the most sought-after by postcard collectors. The best were printed in Germany before World War I. Even if a glass negative is not owned by St. Lucie County, it is sometimes possible to “prove” an image was the work of the Hill family because it can be seen hanging on the wall in photographs of the studio of the Florida Photographic Concern. That was the case with the popular image titled “Rapid Transit in Ft. Pierce” or “Hauling Citrus the Old Fashion Way” and the famous portrait of Seminole matriarch Polly Parker.

SAVING THE COLLECTION

Hill died in 1937, and his son, Lowell and Lowell’s wife, Merle, continued to operate the Florida Photographic Concern. Much of the legacy might have been lost but for a Fort Pierce native who understood its importance and a Hill descendant who maintained a collection of her great-grandfather’s work.

Bob Gladwin, a founder of the History Center, added more than 1,000 negatives and prints to its collection. Gladwin had salvaged them from the old Hill family home and studio, where they were stored in the crawl space beneath the building. Catherine Hill Flowers, Harry Hill’s granddaughter, traded the glass negatives for repairs to the house. Gladwin’s son, Tommy, helped his dad collect the negatives. “I don’t remember too much about getting the glass negatives,” Tommy Gladwin said. “I just remember some of them were outside in the dirt.”

At the museum, Brynn Batsche and Harry Quatraro are organizing and cataloging the Hill collection and storing the negatives and prints in archival materials. Quatraro, who has worked with the collection for nearly three decades, has scanned hundreds of the negatives and is at work removing blemishes with computer software. To give the photographs added significance, as much information as possible will be gathered about each image.

Bob Gladwin worked for years cleaning, printing, identifying and organizing the Hill negatives he acquired. The bulk of them went to the county, but he gave some to Tommy, who keeps them, carefully arranged in archival boxes.

EVEN MORE PHOTOS

Another collection of Hill artifacts, which includes photos and records, is maintained by his great-granddaughter, Janice “Jann” Flowers. Jann, the daughter of Catherine Hill Flowers, has returned to Florida after years of living in Toronto, Canada. Hill photographs, beautifully hand-colored by her mother, hang in her new home in Wellington, 90 minutes from Fort Pierce.

Visit the History Center and you can hear a recording that praises the Hills for establishing same-day processing of film and creating hand-colored photographs and postcards, but the narration continues: “It is not these achievements that made the Hills so significant though. It is the pictures of everyday life that the family took. Thousands of pictures of Treasure Coast farmers, school children, buildings, Seminoles, wildlife, social occasions and so much more were taken by the Hills. The St. Lucie County Regional History Center is the proud owner of the Hill collection. It is perhaps the most important primary source collections of Treasure Coast history and provides us with a unique glimpse into our past.”