[delicate high-pitched chime]
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- Narrator: In 1912, the Village of Prairie du Sac
turned out for the dedication of a new library
and village hall,
funded by local philanthropist J.S. Tripp.
Eighty-five years later, the building
became home to the Tripp Heritage Museum.
There, volunteers made a discovery.
Over the years, people had given the library
boxes of glass plate negatives,
the first photo format
used by amateur photographers.
- Jody Kapp Berndt: This is
a glass plate negative.
It's a very fragile substrate.
You have the glass,
and then you have this layer of chemicals
laid down in a thin film on top of the glass.
And when you hold this up and look at it,
you can't exactly tell
what this is going to bring
until you scan it in
and can see it
on your computer screen.
Suddenly, these images are brought to life
in great detail,
and it's surprise after surprise.
And after scanning several hundred of these,
you start to see patterns.
Here's a woman you've seen before.
Here's a house.
I recognize this place in town.
And our volunteers would
see a house that maybe they weren't quite sure of,
and they'd go out and get in their cars,
and they'd drive around town
to see if that house still stood today.
We have in this image the two photographers
who are our main photographers for the glass plate negatives.
The gentleman at the far back
with the big mustache and the tie,
that's F.S. Eberhart.
He ran his own jewelry store,
watch repair shop.
And then, to his left,
the gentleman with the big watch chain
and the mustache, this is C.C. Steuber,
and he had a farm
just outside of the village at the time.
It's now in the village proper.
And this unlikely pair,
they became amateur photographers.
I love this image because it really speaks
to the fragile nature of the glass plate,
that thin substrate that captures the photograph.
It's peeling apart,
yet, when you look in the center,
you are time-traveling
back to the early 1900s
here in Sauk Prairie.
The girl on the right-hand side
is F.S. Eberhart's daughter,
and you see
what everyday life was like,
the clothes on the line.
What type of clothing were they wearing?
The photographs allow us to see
that intimate look
that we can't see through portrait studio work
and to see the rural community.
The type of equipment they were using,
these steam-powered tractors and threshing machines,
yet also, the large teams of horses
pulling these very early looking plows.
To have all of that documented in one place,
it's just completely perfect.
Coming here into this wide-open landscape
of Sauk Prairie,
it was a tremendous opportunity
to start your own thing,
yet, on the other hand,
it's not going to be easy.
They have the team of horses in the front
and the oxen in the back,
and they're getting ready to break the prairie
to develop farmland,
and this was backbreaking work.
We have two bridges, one in Sauk City
and one in Prairie du Sac.
If you were going to walk or have a wagon
or take your automobile across that bridge,
you were going to pay a toll,
and you would encounter the tollkeeper and his family.
And they lived in the tollkeeper's house.
And this really speaks,
I think, to a long-standing tradition
here in Sauk Prairie
of businesses operated by families.
And I think this really shines through in the way
this family is grouped together.
You can see they are definitely a team.
What's so captivating about these images
is the fact that these were amateur photographers.
They were capturing what was interesting to them,
[alarm clock rings] things that made them laugh,
events that felt were important in their life,
festivals, parades, family,
a lot of family laughing, joking.
So you know that this is
really capturing what life was like.
Yes, it was hard work,
but it was also a lot of fun.
This is the Prairie du Sac train depot.
Every day, trains are running in and out,
so Sauk Prairie really had the best of both worlds.
You had this amazing landscape,
bluffs, river, prairie,
land like you wouldn't believe,
and then you also have the ability
to connect very quickly to the larger cities.
This photo is a classic because
the automobile starts to come into play.
And here you have
this young man, Mr. Steuber.
He is going to teach these three young women
how to drive an automobile.
Farm women, of course, were driving teams of horses.
They would have been very much involved
in learning how to drive
and doing these sorts of things.
I love these glass plate negatives
because they allow us to see
inside homes and businesses.
You get to see all these details
that I think really add the sense
of what life was like then.
And in this picture, we have at the very center
Anna Gasser Moore.
She had a millinery which made
hats for the women of the day.
And not only did she do that for herself,
she brought on young women to work with her,
and she taught them how
to make hats.
Each one of these photos
has such a great sense of detail
and depth and emotion.
And you have this real sense
of being there in that moment.
What they left us,
these two photographers,
is a true legacy.
[birds chirping]