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Sixteen Photographs Documenting Life in and Around the Small Town of Elk, California: Photographer: C M Walker, c. 1895
Description:
16 silver gelatin photographs. 2¼x2¼\" photographs mounted to 3¾x3¾\" white glazed cards, each with the photographer\'s imprint.
An interesting collection of photographs documenting the lives of a homesteading community in rural California. Scenes here depict men, women, and young children on horseback through wooded and brush-like terrain, with what wooden buildings can be seen in a state of some disrepair. The domestic scenes show the women building a fire outside, fishing in a stream, and doing laundry in a large wooden tub, children clothed and unclothed dotting the scenery. The present images have the imprint \"C.M. Walker, Elk, Cal.\" on the mounts.
The tiny, unincorporated community of Elk, in Mendocino County, California, remains quite small to this day--a recent census lists the population at 208. The present collection of photographs depict the community in its nascent days, when it was the site of a large sawmill which was producing, by 1890, 80,000 feet of lumber a day. Indeed, many of the shots show a rather beleaguered landscape of wooded areas stripped down to stumps and decaying limbs. The photographs were taken by Scottish-born photographer C.M. Walker (1862-1947), who emigrated to California in 1892 where he worked on the construction of a dam on the Tuolumne River. An accident on the job led to the loss of a limb and Walker turned to photography, opening his San Francisco studio in 1895, which remained active until 1906 when he was elected Justice of the Peace.
Condition:Light soiling to mounts; few images slightly faded; very good.
