My part of the story starts in 2008. I had moved to the town of Crawfordsville, Indiana, the seat of a rural county of 38,000 people, 50 miles east of Indianapolis. It was utterly charming to me to teach at a 180 year old college in a 19th century town. My infatuation with the town manifested itself in a type of compulsive research into its history. I had left the West Coast and arrived in Civil War country, and I was in the seat of the home of Lew Wallace, a general, and later, a governor and a famous author. He brought fame to his home town in the 1870s for his novel Ben Hur, which an archivist described to my students as “The Harry Potter of its day.” Industry in the town was bustling, as the facades of the handsome buildings still lining Main Street can silently attest. The beautiful period clapboard homes with their curly-cue gingerbread accents in various states of repair and paint reflect the infusion of wealth and expansion as the population shifted from farms to town. I had realtors show me the empty ones. They were full of dust, nooks and crannies, attics, basements, and memories just out of sight.
In the Spring of that year, I started going to the public library, up to the local history room, peppered with little old ladies tracing their roots to the first Indiana settlers. I flipped through folders named for each family they represented, often named for the individual deemed most important in that family. There was a section for Henry Lane, the Senator from Crawfordsville during the Civil War; sections on various important teachers and alumni of the college; much about Lew Wallace as a General, as an author, as his book became a Hollywood film. One folder was named for Ambrose Remley, a Civil War veteran and respected community member. I was focusing my attention on photographs, because I wanted to know the names of the local photographers, to see if any of the empty buildings had remnants of their studios, so I mostly ignored amateur images of blurry figures standing in unknown yards.
Then I came upon this portrait of Ambrose Remley.
It was an interior portrait in natural window light, gloomy and soft-focused, the white glow of his face and beard surrounded by the soft sepia of the darkest tones. Clearly not the work of a professional portrait photographer, nor the work of a box-camera enthusiast. This profound and simple portrait was clearly made by someone who aspired to art, and was consciously creating work within the international Pictorialist photography movement. In Crawfordsville. What was it doing here? Penciled on the back was "Nellie Coutant, 704 Water St. Crawfordsville, IN." I needed to find more about Nellie.
In the Spring of that year, I started going to the public library, up to the local history room, peppered with little old ladies tracing their roots to the first Indiana settlers. I flipped through folders named for each family they represented, often named for the individual deemed most important in that family. There was a section for Henry Lane, the Senator from Crawfordsville during the Civil War; sections on various important teachers and alumni of the college; much about Lew Wallace as a General, as an author, as his book became a Hollywood film. One folder was named for Ambrose Remley, a Civil War veteran and respected community member. I was focusing my attention on photographs, because I wanted to know the names of the local photographers, to see if any of the empty buildings had remnants of their studios, so I mostly ignored amateur images of blurry figures standing in unknown yards.
Then I came upon this portrait of Ambrose Remley.
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Ambrose Remley, photograph by Nellie Coutant, date unknown, item number p031-33 at the Crawfordsville Public Library
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