The first known image of the village is the cover engraving on Alexander Richmond’s 1831 map of the Close estate – almost 200 years ago. It remains the only artistic image of the village before the era of photography.
Photography was pioneered from the 1840s by Daguerre, Fox-Talbot and others but even when commercial photographers began to proliferate, few ventured outside their portrait studios, due to the sensitive chemicals and delicate processes required to produce a stable image. It was some time before landscape photography became popular.
Napier’s Postcards
It was only in the early 1900s that we began to see more than a few outdoor photographs, and the main commercial outlet for these was postcards. The earliest local postcard photographs of Poyntzpass and the surrounding area were taken by William John Napier[1] (b. ca. 1865).
Napier had had a leg amputated aged 19 and travelled the area with his equipment in a pony and trap, which can often be seen in his images. Few of his images are dated, but most were taken in the first decade of the 1900s.
Bob Harvey’s Photographs
Robert (Bob) Harvey[2] was appointed as Principal of Poyntzpass Public Elementary School in 1932 and lived in the village until his death in 1967.
Bob was a true polymath – teacher, musician, wood turner and furniture maker, kite-maker, bee-keeper, mathematician, and prolific amateur photographer. During his time in Poyntzpass he took thousands of photographs of the village and the surrounding area. He did all his own developing and printing – the family’s bathroom doubled as his darkroom. All of his photographs were, of course, monochrome, but when he was particularly pleased with a print, he often hand-tinted it, mainly in the predominant green of the countryside.
When he died, daughters Nan, Alice and Shiela had the task of clearing the house. In those days, local history was almost unheard of and very few people appreciated the historic value of photographic collections such as Bob’s. Aged 16, I was one of the ignorant herd, and I helped the Harvey sisters to burn what must have been many thousands of negatives!
I still feel guilty. What a fabulous resource those photographs would have been if they had survived!
[1] See “Collecting and Listing Local Postcards” by Des Quail in BIF Vol 4 1990
and “The Postcards of W J Napier” in BIF Vol 7 1994
[2] See “The Photographs of Robert Harvey” in BIF Vol 5, 1991