|
View of Boston & Albany passenger train from grounds of Keewaydin
Photograph
by
Francis Blake,
circa 1885
28 cm x 22.5 cm
From the Francis Blake photographs.
Photo. 57.797 with caption, "Building the terraces and greenhouses at Keewaydin, late 1880's."
|
|
In 1885, a version of this photograph of the Boston & Albany passenger train appeared in the gallery of Allen & Rowell, the noted Boston photograph company, and instantly sparked requests for copies. The photograph was taken Francis Blake, a noted inventor and experimental high-speed photographer from Weston, Mass. From 1884 through the late 1890s, Blake's revolutionary high-speed photographs of trains, birds, tennis players, and horseback riders earned him critical acclaim from scientists and artists alike.
This photograph was taken from the garden at Keewaydin, Francis Blake's estate in Weston, Mass. It is now the intersection of Route 128 and the Massachusetts Turnpike. The Boston & Albany Railroad line passed just below the terraces at Keewaydin. In part because the railroad was headed by his cousin, D. Waldo Lincoln, Francis Blake had a standing arrangement with the train's baggage master to have bread and newspapers thrown off the early train from Boston every morning. Occasionally, he also arranged for it to make a stop at the estate just for him. The workers in the foreground of the photograph are building the massive stone terraces that Blake had constructed during 1884 and 1885 along the hillside below Keewaydin.
|
Back
|
