Wisconsin Public Television University Place History Sandwiched In  Dale Williams: "H.H. Bennett and The Wisconsin Dells"  October 5, 2010 UP494      cc >> Catherine Van Susteren: Welcome to the Historical Society Museum this afternoon. I'd like to welcome our guest speaker today, Dale Williams, who is the director of the H.H. Bennett Studio, one of our sites in the Wisconsin Dells. I know you will enjoy the program this afternoon on H.H. Bennett. Thank you. [APPLAUSE]  >> Dale Williams: Thank you, Catherine. And I want to welcome all of you to Madison. I'm from the land of water slides, plastic signs. [LAUGHTER] But there's a lot more to Wisconsin Dells. We refer to it, Catherine referred to it today as The Dells, and you'll hear that all the time. So I'm here at "The Madison" to talk about The Dells for you today. 

But Henry Hamilton Bennett was a very interesting individual. I don't know how many of you have heard of Bennett before. Well, good. I'm really pleased to hear that. He was a pioneer in photography, but he's a very interesting individual. He was born back in 1843 in Canada. His dad was from Canada and his mother across the border in the state of Vermont. And H.H., as he was referred to most of his life, was the oldest of 12 children. As he was growing up, his dad was having a more difficult time finding enough work out in Vermont to support the family. So in 1857 he thought he would come out here to the west and see if they could find more work. 

And he came with his brother. His dad came with his brother and they brought H.H. with them. He was just 14 years old at the time. And the rest of the family stayed back in Vermont. They wanted to see if they could get established and get a job and eventually move the entire family out here which is what they did. But what his dad was doing was working for the railroad as they were moving through the state of Wisconsin. And it's rather interesting, the history of the railroad which then was the Milwaukee and La Crosse, later we refer to it as the Milwaukee line, but it became the Chicago and Milwaukee and St. Paul railroad. And the head of that railroad was a fellow by the name of Byron Kilbourn. And most of you probably know more about Byron Kilbourn than I do. But he was mayor of Milwaukee at one time, formed about half of the city of Milwaukee. 

And he was quite a scoundrel. Way back in the 1840s he had bribed the Wisconsin legislature to give him all kinds of goodies as he pushed his railroad through the state. And at some point they had to cross the Wisconsin River and build a bridge to get their train across the river. At the same time it was going to be a two-level bridge. There would be a roadway underneath it with the railroad tracks on top. And it would be handy for the folks as a way to get across the Wisconsin River with their horses and wagons and the goods. And they had formed a town in Wisconsin called Newport. And Newport is roughly where Lake Delton is now. It's along County A between Baraboo and Wisconsin Dells. Just about four miles south of Wisconsin Dells as we know it today. 

And they had actually formed a company down there, and they had the rights to build a dam across the river. And they started building houses and small retail businesses in Newport. And they tried to get Byron Kilbourn to build his bridge there by giving him the rights to build a dam, that sort of thing. But this was a certain animosity that went on within the community and a lot of it involved dollars. And so Byron Kilbourn decided he was going to build his bridge elsewhere. So he went up the river three or four miles with his crew of engineers and decided to build his bridge across the Wisconsin River at that point. Now he also bought all the land around it. And he plotted his own town, and it became a little bit eponymous. He named it after himself. It became Kilbourn City. 

So this was 1856 as they finished the bridge across the Wisconsin River. More and more people were moving into Kilbourn City and eventually Newport became a ghost town. They ended up moving a lot of those little wooden houses and businesses up the river, some of them by barge and some of them with horse teams, until eventually there was nothing left but a few foundations today of what once was Newport. So that was 1856 and it's the very next year in 1857 that H.H. Bennett came to this area of Kilbourn City with his dad and uncle. And he was learning the trade of carpentry and they were doing some lathing on these new houses and the houses they were moving. But what he really loved to do was explore the Wisconsin River. And he spent all his spare time going up and down the river of what we call the "dells" of the Wisconsin River. And I usually ask the group, do you know what the word "dells" means? You'll read a lot of explanations over the years, but I think the one that's simplest and makes the most sense, it really means the rapids of a river. And there was a series of small rapids as the wide Wisconsin River flowed down from the north. And it came through this seven- or eight-mile stretch that we refer to as the dells with these limestone formations that were formed, they think, thousands of years ago when there was a huge lake in central Wisconsin. 

And that lake was held back by an ice dam. And when that ice melted all the sudden that water surged through here, and it cut through that fairly soft limestone, sandstone, in a matter of perhaps days or weeks. And cut these rock formations that we know as the dells of the Wisconsin River. Now the Ho-Chunk people, in those days, they were known as the Winnebagoes, referred to this as a river on its side, because up north the river is very wide and not very deep. But when you come through the dells, it becomes narrow and very, very deep as it flowed through there. So young Henry Hamilton Bennett loved to spend his spare time exploring these rock formations. He was even known during the winter to go up and climb up some of the faces of the rock where he would see the water flowing down and frozen and try to find the source of the water. And today everything on the Wisconsin River, every rock formation, every gulch and gully has a name. And they're all names that H.H. Bennett gave them way back in the 1860s and 1870s. So he was having fun and learning about these formations and then the Civil War came about. 

And he was a young buck about 19 years old, and he thought it was the patriotic thing to do to sign up for the military. So he enlisted in the 12th Wisconsin Infantry Company E. And they recruited other men from the area of Kilbourn City, Lake Delton. And he got to wear a uniform and he got to learn the rifle maneuvers. And they marched from town to town and he got to chase girls and it was pretty exciting. But eventually they sent him off to the war. And he was in the battle of Vicksburg in 1863, one of the major battles of the Civil War, and he came through that just fine. Then later in that year there was a skirmish, and he went to climb up on a boulder or a tree stump so he could get up a little higher, he could get his gun up and take a shot, and as he went to climb up on this boulder, he used his rifle as kind of a walking stick as he stepped up, and just then the safety failed and it went off, and it put that lead bullet right through the palm of his right hand. Now in those days the medical teams weren't near as sophisticated as they are today, and they thought they might have to amputate his right hand but Bennett wouldn't allow them to. And eventually they sent him to Paducah, and eventually they discharged him from the military. 

But he lost the use of his right hand, except for his thumb and his third finger. So he came back to Kilbourn City, and at the same time he had been starting to date a young lady, her name  was Francis Douty. A very attractive young lady. And she became pregnant. So they hurried off to Lake Delton and got married, and now he had a responsibility to this new wife and this child and how was he going to support them. He couldn't be a Carpenter anymore with that bad right hand. And he decided he wanted to be a photographer. Now he had an uncle, George Houghton in Vermont who was a photographer, and it was about the time during the Civil War when we were changing from the old style of photos where there was no negatives, tintypes, daguerreotypes, ambrotypes, to being able to take a photograph with a negative, which was a sheet of glass. Just a common sheet of window glass. And you coated it with chemicals. 

And you put that in your camera, and you didn't have a shutter in those days. You'd take off your lens cap and you made your exposure. And it would take quite a while in those days to make an adequate exposure. And when you thought you had adequate light that had reached that negative, you put your lens cap back on. You would have to take that sheet of glass out of your camera and keep it in a dark room or dark room box, and you'd have to take other chemicals and evenly apply it across that glass negative to fix that image. Now that was quite a job to be able to do all of that. And it took quite an artist to be able to accomplish that. And at the same time then to make the photo in those days you used a sun printing technique. You took your glass negative, you took your paper, a lot of it was albumen paper in those days which incidentally is what gave those photos that sepia, that red/brown look that you see in old photos. The albumen were made from egg whites, and you put your glass negative and your paper together and you exposed it to the sun. 

And you could make as many prints as you wanted. But in those days you couldn't enlarge or reduce so your photo was the same size as your negative. So it was quite a task to go through all that and be a photographer. Now being the type of community that Kilbourn City was in those days, and Wisconsin Dells certainly is today, there was already a little photo shop in this little community of about a thousand people. And it had been the old tintype style, and Bennett bought the business, not the real estate, and he went to work taking photos. Now most of the work in those days was mothers bringing their children in to have a photo taken. So he'd bring them inside and set them up with a background, and he would tell them not to move and he'd get behind his camera and he would take the lens cap off and wait. Might be three seconds, might be five seconds, could be much longer depending upon the light. Put the lens cap back on, and using this technique and the sun printing, it would take a day or two to make the photos. Well the mothers would come in to get the photos, and guess what, the kids had moved, the images were blurred and the mothers grumbled to Bennett. 

He referred to these people as his victims. He didn't really like taking these photos, but he's trying to make a living with his wife and this new baby. So the second year, in 1866, he quit renting that store front and he and Frankie, that's what he called his wife, her nickname, and the baby, they got on the train and they went up to Tomah. It was a much larger town, they set up a tent and they started to do photography outdoors. There's a lot more people in Tomah and it was fairly lucrative for him, but come fall they decided they'd come back to Kilbourn City, they had family there to help with the baby. And he re-rented the studio and went back to work again. Only this time they did something different. Frankie took over the portrait work, freeing Bennett to go out along the river in these beautiful rock formations he knew so well. And he said he loved to take pictures of the rocks, because he could open the shutter of his camera and leave it open all day long and they didn't move on him. [LAUGHTER] So that was the start of really the principal kind of photography he was doing in those days, which was stereoviews. 

And some of you may be familiar with the stereoscope and stereoviews, had a variety of names. But what it is it's a card that has two photos that look identical, but they're taken with a camera that has two lenses that are two and a half inches apart just like your eyes are two and a half inches apart. And when you mount them and you put them in your stereoviewer and take a look at it, you get that 3-D effect. Remember the View-Masters? This came before the View-Masters. So you bring it in and out and this is the way people learned about the world. And I'm going to pass this around and you guys take a look at that. There's Bennett with one of his black dark room boxes when he's out on the river there. And so he started taking stereoviews of the beautiful rock formations on the dells of the Wisconsin River. And he started selling them through agents around the country. He would mount these views and print them and they were sold through agents. 

And people started coming to, wanted to see the actual rock formations so they started coming to Kilbourn City. Now the railroad was right on top of this. Their train already ran through town. So they hired Bennett to do more images, and they put them up in their train stations from Chicago up to St. Paul/Minneapolis. And they promoted this and that's the way that tourism really started in Wisconsin Dells was by Bennett's photographs. And he continued to take those photographs for many years. He was now considered, or he is today considered by many to be one of the best photographers of what we call the golden age of landscape photography, which was basically the end of the 19th century, the 1800s, from 1865 up to 1900. And at least one book has pegged him as one of the 10 best in the entire world. And yet he spent his entire life in this little community of Kilbourn City, which eventually became Wisconsin Dells. In 1931 they saw there was so much tourism, they saw an advantage in changing the name from Kilbourn City to Wisconsin Dells as it's known today. 

So that's roughly how tourism started in The Dells. Bennett continued his photography up through 1908. He died on January 1, 1908. But with his wife Frankie he had three children, two girls and a boy, Ashley. And I was telling you how Frankie had taken over all the portrait work inside the studio. And she also worked with all the chemicals in the dark room. And Frankie had become very ill and Bennett had taken her out to Arizona to see if the atmosphere would help her. But she died at the age of 37. And that was a very sad time in his life. He had bouts of depression. 

He always had money problems. He was the oldest of the 12 children, and many of his brothers and sisters came to him with their problems. And now he had three teenage kids, and his wife had died. And he partially blamed himself for her death, because they didn't realize in those early days how dangerous some of those chemicals were that she worked with in the dark room. And at the same time, the stereoview market started declining. So it was really a tough time in his life. But then another young lady was in the community. Her name was Evaline Marshall. And Bennett was quite taken by her, and this was about six years after Frankie had died. And he wooed her and he proposed to her and she turned him down. 

And he worked on her dad. [LAUGHTER] He worked on her brother. He kept after her and finally she went up to St. Paul I think just to get away from him, and he proposed to her again. He wrote her letters and finally she said, I'll think about it and I'll give you my answer. And he waited every day for that letter to arrive. And it finally came from Evaline, and she said, I am not going to marry you. I don't want you so send me anymore flowers. I don't want you to contact me again. That's it. And that was a really depressing time for him. 

And then she came home and she changed her mind. [LAUGHTER] And in 1890 they were married in Kilbourn City. And what's interesting is that Evaline was 20 years younger than Bennett. He was 47 at this point. She was 27. Bennett's own daughters were over 20. So there was a little friction in the family there for a while. But eventually, because his girls were used to be head of the household, his son didn't care. He was off having a good time, Ashley. He's quite the character, I'll talk about him. 

But eventually they got along together. And they had a very successful marriage, and they had two girls with Evaline, Miriam and Ruth. But Bennett would not allow Evaline to work in that dark room. And it wasn't until he became very, very ill towards the end of his life that she had to take over the studio and do a lot of the work. So that's kind of, briefly, about their life. So Bennett spent his entire life doing photography in the state of Wisconsin, Illinois, Iowa and Minnesota. And he did a lot of very, very unique things, but besides being a great photographer, he was also an inventor. And he invented a variety of things for the world of photography. One of them was I was talking about how you would make the print using the sun printing technique. So they had a little print house, it was just a wooden shack, probably 10 by 14 feet, and it set right behind Bennett's studio in downtown Kilbourn City, and it looked like a greenhouse in the front where he put these printing cases with a glass negative and the paper together and let the sun making the print. 

Well the problem was the sun is moving all day long. So you could only make prints X hours a day depending upon the time of year. So Bennett the inventor came up with an idea of having a revolving print house. And he used Evaline's dad had a machine shop and they worked out a mechanism where he had this little shack up on stilts and he had iron rollers underneath it and he had a chain and wheel mechanism. And he could crank that and move that entire print house 270 degrees and follow the sun all day long. And there's only one other known revolving print house in America, literally in the world. In the 1970s the descendants of Bennett gave that original print house, what was left of it, to the Smithsonian, and they have it in their collection, but it's not on exhibit, in Washington, DC. Another one of his inventions was the instantaneous shutter. And I was telling you how these glass negatives originally were called what we call the wet plate process where you put the chemicals over, you exposed it and you had to put the other chemicals on it to fix the image. Well, eventually they started making what were called dry plates. 

They were still glass negatives but they were made in a factory. And they were a little faster, well quite a bit faster, than the old wet plate process. But Bennett was very reluctant to change over to the dry plate because he thought the image he had accomplished with his wet plates was much better. And it was. But eventually he changed over to the dry plates which could allow him to take a faster image, and then he perfected what he called the instantaneous shutter. And his first samples of the shutter used a rubber band and a mechanism on the outside of his stereo camera where you had these two lenses that would open and close it fairly rapidly. And he perfected that in 1886. And I didn't bring that photo. But all of you have seen the Jump at Stand Rock. That's his son Ashley when he was 17 years old making that jump. 

And when they came out with that photo people said it had to be a fake photo, that no one could accomplish stopping action of somebody making that jump. But Bennett had accomplished that using his instantaneous shutter. And Bennett was also the very first to capture fireworks successfully. And he did a little photography up in St. Paul, Minnesota, during the ice carnival. And he went into Chicago and did photography, some of the commercial photography of a lot of the buildings. We have Marshall Field from way back in that era. So a lot of the things he did. But he was also a very, very fussy, very perfectionist type of person. And if he could take another image of a rock formation he thought a better angle, better time of day, better time of year, he would do it and destroy the first image. He was always trying to take that perfect photo. 

But in later life he admitted that he had never taken a perfect photo, that every photo could have been improved. And that's the type of individual he was over the years. He had chances to go out west and do photography of Grand Canyon and areas that others had shot out west, but he never wanted to leave his family long enough to make those very long trips so he would just take these short trips, whether it was up to Minnesota or Chicago or Milwaukee, and do photography throughout his life. That's rather kind of interesting. I brought a few images along just so show the different kinds of photography. This one is of Yellow Thunder. And Yellow Thunder was the chief of the Winnebago, now the Ho-Chunk, people, and supposedly he was a hundred-plus years old when Bennett took this photo. I don't know whether he really was or not but he looks like that way. And this was from very, very early in his life, about 1865 or 1866. They actually did that photograph. 

And Bennett did quite a bit of photography of the Native Americans. He thought that we were going to lose the culture of the Native Americans. The government had tried to move the various tribes around including the Winnebago people. They tried moving them out to Nebraska and other places, and they ended up coming back so Bennett would spend time meeting with the Ho-Chunk and Winnebago people and try to record their various small villages as they moved through. They would spend their winter in Illinois and, excuse me I got it wrong, their summers in Illinois and their winters up in northern Wisconsin. We always think that's backwards. But as they float along the dells of the Wisconsin River they had a lot of these encampments and Bennett would spend time out traveling with them. And in fact, a book was just published about that just a little over a year ago called "Picturing Indians." And this is by a historian from the University of Texas and is totally about Bennett and his Native American photography. And the genesis of the book is that Bennett was a great photographer and these are really neat shots, but we think he took some advantage of the Native Americans for his own commercial gain. And Bennett was always interested in the commercial use of his photography. 

He was interested in taking photos that people were interested in and that would sell. So I'm not sure there was anything totally wrong with that. But that's rather intriguing. You can see how the boat rides started on the dells with these little jon boats or row boats. With one person rowing the boat. That's pretty tough going against the current when you're going up river, it's much easier what you're coming back. And then they brought the first steamboats into the dells in the 1870s, the mid-1870s, and gradually they built up over the years as more and more boats. And what's interesting is that Bennett was also an early environmentalist. And when the Southern Wisconsin Power Company had proposed building a dam on the Wisconsin River in downtown Kilbourn, Bennett opposed it. He went to his Congressman. 

He went all over. But they said, no, no we have to have this electric power because the future of Kilbourn City isn't tourism, it's factories. We're going to have a lot of factories and we have to have electric for them. They were wrong on that part. They were right on the part you need a lot of electricity to run all those water slides nowadays. Actually, the dam at Kilbourn City, it was one of the largest dams, one of the largest power plants in the entire world at the time of construction. And Bennett totally opposed it. But he did some photography of the building of the dam, perhaps mercifully he died before the dam was completed and he could see his beautiful dells that were flooded. Because at the dam it raised the water level on the upper dells 17 feet and covered up a lot of these beautiful rock formations that Bennett had taken for so many years. Here's one of Bennett's interesting photos. 

This is called Looking Out of Boat Cave, a flashlight picture. And I always ask the fourth graders, why do you suppose they called that a flashlight picture? Well Bennett wanted to take a picture of this cave, but it would turn absolutely black on his photos. And he didn't think that was very interesting. So he and his brother went in and white-washed that entire cave. Spent several days doing that. That's how much time and effort Bennett would put in taking a photo. And then he set off a chemical flash back here next to the camera which then bounced off of the cave. And yet he had some natural light outside that allowed him to pick up in the background. So that's how much trouble Bennett would go to take a photograph and make it better. Now today if you went to Boat Cave you'd have to wear your scuba gear because it's under water after they built the dam and completed it. 

We talk about Bennett being very fastidious in his trade, and he certainly had that artistic ability. Something else was very interesting was the rafting on the Wisconsin River. Now for years they had cut down trees in northern Wisconsin, originally they would simply take those tree trunks and throw them in the river and probably you've seen pictures of those big log jams that were created. And they'd have to go in and use dynamite to blow them up. Then someone had discovered they could take the logs and they could rough saw them and they could take them and make rafts out of them and tie them together, sometimes three or four layers of this, and make rafts. And they could actually raft them down to market. Now when they come to the dells where it was very narrow, what they'd have to do is take these long rafts apart, and they would have to shoot through the rapids here of the dells in this seven- or eight-mile stretch and when they got through they could re-tie the rafts together, and they could go on down to the Mississippi and sometimes they would go as far south as St. Louis. And then I always ask the kids, you know how these raftsmen got back to central and northern Wisconsin? They walked. If you could imagine. So Bennett went out in 1886 after he invented this instantaneous shutter, and he spent three weeks with his son Ashley again and traveling with this crew from Arpin and doing the photography of them rafting on the Wisconsin River. 

And today this is credited as one of the first examples of photojournalism. There's about 42 images that he did that tells a complete story of rafting on the Wisconsin River. And about a year ago when we had Antiques Roadshow in Madison, many of you may remember they made three episodes out of that, out of their meet here in Madison, and each episode had an inset or a three- or four-minute interesting thing in the area and one of them they did is they came up to Bennett and they brought one of their appraisers, Wes Cowan out of Cincinnati. And he was most intrigued by Bennett's rafting series. And he feels of all the photography that Bennett did over the years that the rafting is the most interesting and he thinks worth the most dollars today for collectors in collecting a lot of Bennett images. So that was kind of intriguing that we had the expert up. And he did the rafting series in 1886. He also used his family in a lot of his photographs. And his girls in his first family used to complain bitterly that every Sunday they had to go on a picnic with their mom and dad and have their photo taken. But I think they add scale and interest to a lot of Bennett's photography over the years. 

And these are the girls from his first marriage. But you'll find Miriam and Ruth from his second marriage in just a ton of Bennett's photography over the years. And what's also intriguing is that the Bennett Studio today, several things about it. Number one, we're the oldest business in Wisconsin Dells. There's not another business, not the bank, the Catholic church beats us, but not a business that's been there continually since 1865. So we're the oldest business in Wisconsin Dells. And it was operated by the family up until 1998 when they gave it to the Wisconsin Historical Society and was actually operated by the granddaughter and her husband, Jean and Ollie Reese. I don't know if any of you have known them over the years. They had operated it for about 40 years. So it's intriguing. 

This was definitely the oldest family-operated photography studio and we may be the oldest operated photography studio in the US, perhaps in the world at this point in time. So that's rather intriguing what Bennett did over the years. He was so fastidious. There's just really so many stories about him. I'm trying to think what I haven't covered here. Katherine talked about a brand new book. Sara Rath had written a book about Bennett in the '70s called the Pioneer Photographer. And that didn't tell the complete story, and she just completed this brand new book which we've had up in The Dells for about a week and Sara will be at our place on Saturday, October 16th, autographing it. And it's just a wonderful story. She's added a lot of history to it, a lot of Bennett's photographs over the years that he did. 

And we're really excited. This is produced by the University of Wisconsin Press and it will be, I think, an exciting addition to virtually anybody's library. Also, we still make, on site we hand print the prints that we sell in our shop. The Historical Society does some digital printing here, but everything we do up in The Dells is hand-printed. We're not allowed to use his original glass plates. We have 7,000 or 8,000 of them stored downstairs in a humidity controlled air conditioned room. But we have surrogate negatives that were made, not all the images but several hundred of them. And we actually hand-print them and we re-create the sepia tone on them. And our printer actually puts his name on the back of each one and then we gold stamp them with Bennett's signature and we put them on this acid-free mat and foam board. So we're providing a lot more of Bennett's photographs to the entire area. 

Chula Vista, during their big, big remodeling, three or four years ago, all the rooms now have Bennett photographs. We just finished photography for The Dells Clinic. We're just going into a process of doing a lot for Christmas Mountain's new condos and additions. So what we're trying to do is expose more of the people that come into The Dells about the history of The Dells. So many of them come up there and haven't the foggiest notion of why the dells are there. Many of them don't even know about the river. All they know about today are the water slides and the fun things. But it really started with H.H. Bennett. And one other story, I talked about the Southern Wisconsin Power Company building this dam. When they built the dam on the upper dells, and of course as they brought the water level up, it flooded a lot of farmers' fields. 

So the power company had to buy all this land from the farmers. So, H.H. Bennett's son-in-law, George Crandall, went back to the power company after the dam was completed and offered to buy that land from them. And they readily sold it to him. So that's what's preserved so much of the land on the upper dells and kept it away from development. And in the 1950s the family left that to WARF, the University of Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation. They also left the boat company which the son-in-law had owned, all the major boat companies on the dells of the Wisconsin River. And just about 10 years ago now WARF sold the land to the DNR, and that's what preserved so much of it, and they sold the boat companies back to the operators. We've had two or three families have operated boat companies over the years. When you go up the dells and you decide you want to ride on the lower or upper dells, you don't know whether you're getting on an Olson boat or a Riverview boat or a Dells Boat Company because they've always worked together. They have great fights amongst each other but to the tourists they work together. 

[LAUGHTER] And you buy one ticket and that way they've eliminated all the competition over the years in doing that. So it's really intriguing what we have in The Dells. We say we have more entrepreneurs per square mile in Wisconsin Dells than anywhere in the nation. And I think that's true. I'd like to open it up for questions that you might have and I'll try to answer. [APPLAUSE]