Dall-Healey Family Photographs ca. 1850-1911 Guide to the Photograph Collection

Table of Contents Collection Summary Biographical Sketches Sources Collection Description Related Materials Acquisition Information Organization of the Collection Detailed Description of the Collection Preferred Citation Access Terms

Collection Summary

Biographical Sketches

Mark Healey (1791-1876)

Mark Healey, born in New Hampshire, was a merchant and banker. His first financial successes were in shipping and importing, and he served as first president of Merchants' Bank, president of the Atlantic Mutual Fund, and as a railroad director. Healey suffered a financial reversal during the Panic of 1837, leading to his family's bankruptcy, from which they recovered. After converting in early adulthood, Healey was a dedicated adherent of Unitarianism. He was a close confidant of his daughter Caroline.

Caroline Wells Healey Dall (1822-1912)

Caroline Wells Healey Dall was born in Boston to Mark Healey (1791-1876) and Caroline Foster (1800-1871). Caroline's father took great interest in her schooling, and she was well-educated in private schools and by tutors. Following a temporary financial reversal that led to the Healey family bankruptcy in 1837, Caroline became a teacher, and she was vice-principal at Miss English's School for Young Ladies in Georgetown, D.C. from 1842 to 1844. She was active in the Unitarian Church, and shared religious interests led to her marriage in 1844 to minister Charles Henry Appleton Dall. They had two children, William Healey Dall (1845-1927) and Sarah Keene Dall (b. 1849), and they lived in Baltimore, Portsmouth, New Hampshire, Needham, Massachusetts, and Toronto as Charles served various parishes. The marriage was troubled, and in 1855, Charles became a Unitarian minister-at-large in India while his family remained in Boston.

In addition to her activity in the Unitarian community, Caroline also became interested in transcendentalism and the ideas of Margaret Fuller in the 1840s. She wrote Essays and Sketches (addressing Christian themes) in 1849 and became a women's rights activist and a more prolific writer after Charles's move to India, relying in large part upon her lecturing and writing to support herself and her family. Perhaps the most influential of her many books is The College, the Market, and the Court; or Woman's Relation to Education, Labor, and Law (1867). Caroline lived in Washington, D.C. with her son William after 1879.

Charles Henry Appleton Dall (1816-1886)

Charles Henry Appleton Dall, a Unitarian minister and missionary, was born in Baltimore to James Dall, Sr. (1781-1863) and Henrietta Austin Dall (b. 1788). In 1824, Charles was sent to Boston, where he lived with relatives of his father, for his schooling. Charles graduated from Harvard College in 1837 and Harvard Divinity School in 1840. In 1841, Charles was ordained a Unitarian evangelist, and he served as a minister-at-large in St. Louis from 1840 to 1842, in Baltimore from 1843 to 1845, and in Portsmouth, New Hampshire in 1846. He served as a pastor in Needham, Massachusetts from 1847 to 1849 and Toronto from 1850 to 1854.

Charles met with mixed success as a minister, which led, along with his marital difficulties, to his move to Calcutta, India in 1855. He served there as the first and only American Unitarian foreign missionary, where he was minister to the European and American Unitarian congregation and founded and directed several schools, but he found difficulty winning converts to Unitarianism. Charles lived in India until his death, visiting the United States in 1862, 1869, 1872, 1875, and 1882.

William Healey Dall (1845-1927)

William Healey Dall was born in Boston to Caroline Wells Healey Dall (1822-1912) and Charles Henry Appleton Dall (1816-1886). He married Annette Whitney in 1880 and had two sons and one daughter.

Although he did not attend college, William became a noted natural historian, paleontologist, and malacologist. As a teenager, William found mentors in physician and naturalist Augustus A. Gould, Harvard zoologist Louis Agassiz, and the faculty of the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology. In 1863, he became a clerk in the land office of the Illinois Central Railway, which led to his appointment in 1865 to the Western Union Telegraph Expedition to Alaska and the Yukon. He became a member of the California Academy of Science and gathered specimens on the Pacific Coast when he passed through California in the spring of 1865. During his three years of travel, he collected thousands of biological specimens, studied Indian and Eskimo linguistics, and completed the first detailed examination of the resources of the interior of the territory. With his 1870 book Alaska and Its Resources, William was recognized as the nation's leading expert on Alaska. From 1871 to 1884, he worked for the United States Coast Survey, where he directed a scientific survey of the Aleutian Islands and adjacent coasts. Beginning in 1884, he served as paleontologist for the Geological Survey, and he performed research on mollusks at the U.S. National Museum in Washington, D.C. He continued to work in his office at the Smithsonian Institution after his 1923 retirement until his death.

Sources

Benjamin, Marcus. "William Healey Dall. " Dictionary of American Biography. New York, C. Scribner's Sons, 1928-1936. Reproduced in Biography Resource Center. Farmington Hills, Michigan: The Gale Group, 2003. Available at: http://www.galenet.com/servlet/BioRC.

"Caroline Wells (Healey) Dall." Contemporary Authors Online, Gale, 2003. Reproduced in Biography Resource Center. Farmington Hills, Michigan: The Gale Group, 2003. Available at: http://www.galenet.com/servlet/BioRC.

"Caroline Wells Healey Dall. " Feminist Writers. Detroit: St. James Press, 1996. Reproduced in Biography Resource Center. Farmington Hills, Michigan: The Gale Group, 2003. Available at: http://www.galenet.com/servlet/BioRC.

"Dall, Caroline Wells Healey." American Reformers. New York: H.W. Wilson, 1985. Reproduced in Wilson Biographies Plus Online. New York: H.W. Wilson, 2003.

Genzmer, George H. "Caroline Wells Healey Dall. " Dictionary of American Biography. New York, C. Scribner's Sons, 1928-1936. Reproduced in Biography Resource Center. Farmington Hills, Michigan: The Gale Group, 2003. Available at: http://www.galenet.com/servlet/BioRC.

Rose, Anne C. "Dall, Caroline Wells Healey." American National Biography, vol. 6. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. pp. 26-27.

Schneider, Robert A. "Dall, Charles Henry Appleton." American National Biography, vol. 6. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. pp. 27-29.

Thomas, Phillip Drennon. "Dall, William Healey." American National Biography, vol. 6. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. pp. 29-30.

Collection Description

The Dall-Healey family photographs contain 297 nineteenth-century photographs in three albums and one narrow box, consisting primarily of cartes de visite, as well as eleven paper-based prints, six daguerreotypes, and five tintypes in three albums and one narrow box. The photographs date from between 1850 and 1911. Among the photographers represented are F. Gutekunst of Philadelphia, Bradley & Rulofson (Henry William Bradley and William Herman Rulofson) of San Francisco, Calif., Henry Ulke of Washington, D.C., and James Wallace Black, A. Sonrel, and John Adams Whipple of Boston, Mass.

The bulk of the photos date from ca. 1860-1890 and are commercial portrait cartes de visite of various Dall, Foster, and Healey family members, as well as family friends and acquaintances. A few prominent figures, including Lucretia Mott and Thomas K. Beecher, are also represented.

The photographs in the William Healey Dall carte de visite album are commercial photographs, many of which reflect Dall's interest in natural history, including photographs of scenes from his journey to Alaska and the Yukon, photos relating to anthropological and botanical interests, and portraits of fellow naturalists and colleagues from the Western Union Telegraph Expedition. Several of the photos depict Civil War soldiers and sailors.

Related Materials

The Massachusetts Historical Society (MHS) library holds the following collections that are related to the Dall-Healy family photographs:

Caroline Wells Healey Dall papers, 1811-1917. Ms. N-1082.

Caroline Wells Healey Dall journals [additions], 1863-1912. Ms. N-1083.

Dall-Healey family papers, 1662-1957. Ms. N-409. Finding aid available at: http://www.masshist.org/findingaids/doc.cfm?fa=fa0057.

Other collections of Caroline Wells Healey Dall papers are located at the Schlesinger Library on the History of Women at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, the Bryn Mawr College Library Special Collection, and the Library of Congress Manuscript Division.

Charles Henry Appleton Dall professional papers are held by the Andover-Harvard Theological Library at the Harvard Divinity School.

Additional collections of William Healey Dall papers are located in the Cecil H. Green Library at Stanford University and the Smithsonian Institution Archives.

Collections of correspondence and other Dall family papers may be found at the John Hay Library at Brown University and the Special Collections and Archives of the W.E.B. Du Bois Library at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Acquisition Information

This collection was removed from the Dall-Healey family papers, which were a gift to the Massachusetts Historical Society from Whitney and Barbara K. Dall in June 2002.

Organization of the Collection

The collection is organized into the following series.

Detailed Description of the Collection

Preferred Citation

Dall-Healey family photographs, Photo. Coll. 69, Massachusetts Historical Society Photo Archives.

Access Terms

This collection is indexed under the following headings in ABIGAIL, the online catalog of the Massachusetts Historical Society. Researchers desiring materials about related persons, organizations, or subjects should search the catalog using these headings.