The Mystery of the Glass Negatives

Before photographs were digital and on film, they were on glass. And I found 216 in my basement.

In 1978, I found a cache of remarkable glass negatives from the early 1900s in the dark, dank basement of a 70-year-old house I bought in Glenside, PA in 1978. It was always a mystery who the photographer was, and why these negatives ended up in a house that I knew wasn’t his.

Back in the late 70s, I was heavy into black & white photography and even built a darkroom in the basement of my Glenside home. There, I printed a few of the glass negatives.

The very first one I developed was actually taken in front of that home in 1914, July 12, 1914, to be exact.

The person who took the photo had written the info on the paper envelope that the negative was originally in. The photo was of “Meta & Norman.” Meta was Meta McDermond, the woman I bought the house from in 1978. She was in her 90s at the time. Norman was her son, who was present at the sale.

I treasured the photo, framed it, and kept it on the mantle in Glenside until we moved in 1992. We still have it in our home in California today.

For years, I kept the negatives in a closet in my current home. The 4x5 glass negatives were in an old sewing kit that I my mother gave me, and the 5x7s in a cardboard box.

I eventually was able to digitize all the negatives, and last month, I started posting them in this Substack blog. The response has been overwhelming. So much so that I’ve started to catalog and organize them (based on the photographer’s notes) according to date and places where they were taken.

I did a count. There are 177 4x5 negatives and 39 5x7s. That makes 216 glass negatives in all. Laying them out took up much of the available space in my dining room

There are still quite a few that are undated and unidentified, but they range between 1905-1915, with the bulk of the photos taken in 1910 and 1911.

But there were still questions I wanted answered: Who took them? And why were they in the McDermond’s basement? Back when I found them in 1978, I asked Norman McDermond if he knew who the photographer was, and he had no idea. He didn’t even know the negatives were there.

There were several things that the photographer had in his notes that gave me a clue to his identity. I’ll share those in my next post. But meanwhile, the photographer is in the picture below. What’s your best guess as to who it is?’

I’ll reveal the answer in my next post, but our paid subscribers will get the answer now!