[Music] The first real practical attempts at the science of photography came in the early 1800s.

With that invention, our record of people, places, and events changed in ways that help us better understand the stories of our history.

[Music] The great thing about the history of the Cottonwood Ranch is as a hobby, John Fenton Pratt was a photographer, as far as I know, beginning in 1885 and going up until 1936.

So it has frozen a moment of time.

In history, you see a lot of names of people of settlers around and stuff, but we have pictures of them.

And they're primarily made off glass negatives that John Fenton Pratt had taken.

They were in various outbuildings and stuff.

And when his daughter Hilda passed away in 1980, John Fenton Pratt's granddaughter and two grandsons, they were aware enough to get the glass negatives preserved and they donated to the Kansas State Historical Society.

So the prints I have are from the glass negatives of John Fenton Pratt.

Pratt had seven nephews and a niece that they were very interested in the Cottonwood Ranch.

So they were able to identify a lot of these people.

And then the people from around the area, when I first received these, I would show them to, we'll call them the old timers or the elderly, wise people that would come in.

And so they identified a lot of them too that I didn't know or would verify.

This still goes on in the last few weeks, verified another one.

They had seen a previous Cottonwood Connections program and say, "Who is that on the wall?"

That person went and did a lot more research.

So you can go through the photographs and find something different almost every time because I go through these often.

Some of them have been enlarged.

The glass negative for this particular tombstone was enlarged for this.

And with that enlargement and today's technology, we know the name on the tombstone and stuff.

We know when the person died.

Now when we get the photographs on this, we wish this picture could talk.

Because what we knew is this guy came over, his name was Foster Ripon, and he passed away here in Kansas.

And the family said bury him here because he had relatives still in England.

And so they did.

My feeling is, and this is totally speculation, that he took this picture, just sent it to England to show the family how and where he was buried.

This dugout that the Pratts first lived in, this is a picture of the dugout.

Now it has a rock face on it.

Every dugout had to have a roof to have it be a structure according to the law of the Homestead Act.

It had to have a window in it, and it had to have a door.

Well, so here the combination is the window and the door are the same thing.

The window was in the door, so that covered the law.

This dugout is not there anymore, but we do have a picture of what it was like.

So archeologically, we could probably do excavations on that dugout and compare it to the picture and get a lot more information.

This is an early picture of the house.

There was stone made of Ogallala stone, which is a sandy limestone, or held together by lime, versus around the windows and the trim.

It's from the Smoky Hill Chalk.

So one of the stones, the Ogallala, as it's called, is gray, and the Smoky Hill Chalk is a yellow.

So it stands out pretty good.

But the first house had a vaulted or curved sod roof on it.

There are boards under it, but you can see the sod up on top.

Now that's in some of the documentation we have that started out as a one-room rock house with a dirt floor and a sod-covered roof.

The next phase is that a gable roof was put on in 1888.

On the ends of some of these photographs, you can see the end and you can see the house line where that vaulted sod roof became a pointed or gable roof.

This picture was zoomed in on, and this is a portion with a gable roof on it at the bathhouse and sheep out in the yard.

Very bare.

The outbuildings, which we see portions of, are made of sod.

And even a white spot back here that is very, very hard to see.

And it's just here, and it just looks like a flaw in the deal.

But that is the quarry where they quarried the stone for the south face of the house.

But still in the pasture today, you can see the depression where this is, where they quarried that stone.

And where they quarried the stone, my feeling is they opened a spring at that time.

It was a seep spring.

So they quit quarrying the stone there because they didn't want to mess up the spring.

And so the house had running water in it because he piped the spring.

He developed the spring and piped it and had a cistern up there.

And that spring was in the background is about eight feet higher than the house.

So it was all gravity flow into the house and the wash house.

And that water was used by his daughter Hilda until 1973 when they dug a well for the house.

We see the door of the house, which is there.

And the house is a little bit offset.

In 1890, they added a wing.

And after 1892, 1991-92, when the stone buildings were built, they started putting trees around it.

You get things which isn't here anymore.

The bath house, which was the outdoor toilet.

But it was improper for it to be referred to as the privy or the toilet.

So it was called the bath house because it was divided into two rooms.

The two-hole toilet bench was on one side.

And the other room contained a small wash basin and also a small round bathtub.

So it was called the bath house rather than the privy or the toilet.

That was just the proper thing to do.

And so we had that.

And we can gage where the location was.

This was its second location with this part of the house.

And the 1896 house isn't added on.

And so why didn't it stay there after 1896?

Because in 1896 is when they installed the indoor bathroom.

But in between 1890 and 1896, when they finished the house, they built stone out buildings in the back.

And those were all built in 1891 and 1992.

Because the other advantage we have with the history of Cottonwood Ranch, we have ledgers that John Fenton Pratt kept with all the items in it.

And he would say when he built this how much he paid for the stone.

So we have that.

And then a winter picture of 1896 or shortly thereafter, we see the house complete.

The original part of the house is in this area.

The west wing is over here.

And the east wing has been put on.

But when I came to the ranch, all the exterior woodwork was painted brown, which looked pretty good.

But it wasn't historically correct.

Because the black and white photos show this.

So today, if you'd come to the Cottonwood Ranch, you'd see that the porch posts are not brown.

They are painted white with blue rings around it.

But in this you see kind of a gray stuff around the porch and stuff.

Okay, that was a gray paint on the white.

So paint samples were taken from that and it was light blue.

This is Elsie Pratt sitting in front of a dressing screen that we do have.

Allegedly Mrs.

Pratt, the paint Pratt's wife, Jenny, brought the fabric with her when she came over from England.

And this was one of the first things she did.

This was a one-room house so she needed a screen because there was a lot of company.

And so this is all hand embroidered.

So we had this.

And the dressing screen that Mrs.

Pratt made is in several pictures.

It was donated to us by Virginia Krauss.

It's kind of battered not only for its age, but allegedly, according to one of Fent Pratt's nephews, the story goes that maybe folklore that he had folded up the screen and put it in the back of his buck board and put his camera on top to protect the camera.

And then when he got there, he'd get the camera out with a tripod and set it up and use the dressing screen as background.

But we can't prove that.

That's again hearsay and folklore, but very well could have happened.

Now Fent took a lot of portraits around with his camera and he only charged him the materials.

He didn't charge him for his services.

The photos lead to other things.

They will prove some things, but then other questions are asked from the photos.

But this is just some of the house because we have other little items of various individuals in it.

People in the backyard, people sitting in glider swings.

And even pictures, oddly enough, I must have been pretty proud of it, were pictures of the garden.

And with this, you can analyze some of its rhubarb, some of its corn, some of its squash or pumpkin.

But the Pratt photographs have people, buildings, not only the Cottonwood Ranch, but buildings at Studley, all sorts of things.

One of the kind of treasured things is the first Studley school.

And it was in Graham County just across the county line.

So it was the joint district number one of G.S.

of Graham and Sheridan County.

It was a two room school with the students in front.

And we know a lot of the students in here.

We have photos of other homesteads and farmsteads that people wanted their picture taken.

We have pictures of various activities.

We have a 19 teens photograph of actually four of his nephews, two in uniform during World War I because they had what they called the Studley Home Guard.

The Studley Nine, the baseball team.

And you'll count and you go, there's 10 people there.

But that's right.

But this is Harry Pratt, who is not in relation to these people.

He was the manager coach of the Studley Nine.

There's a couple of guys here in the front row.

They're the Hedge twins, Roy and Ray.

We have others, some of the English people around, some of the people.

And some of these are identified, but taken at the Foster Ranch.

And we have Abraham Pratt, the father of Fent Pratt and his brother Tom.

We have the Foster brothers who are friends of theirs over in England.

We have Frank Brandrum back here.

We have Gertie Pratt.

And we have Sarah Lister Pratt, who is a widow.

And after her husband died in 1887, she wore black for the rest of her life.

Jimmy Kirk was a half-brother to Abraham Pratt that came over here and settled about three miles west of here, basically a mile north and homesteaded.

But other daily activities, haircuts, had to have a barber.

So this is Jimmy Foster with a pipe in his mouth cutting Frank Brandrum's hair.

These were both characters.

Probably a lot of people would want to notch Frank Brandrum's hair, but probably with an axe or a revolver or a ball bat, because he was such a character as it was.

We also have pictures of animals.

These are puppies.

And they're on the couch.

We have that couch in the house now.

And so this was taken outside.

There are very few interior photographs of the, in fact, there's none of the ranch, taken by Fent Pratt.

I don't know if he was using a, you know, first of all, you'd see on movies and stuff where they have the big flash and the sulfur to get it.

The flash, well, maybe Mrs.

Pratt didn't want that happening in the house.

I don't know, but there's no interior photos.

So this couch was actually taken outside.

Why was these pictures taken?

Was he sending them back to England to show people?

Because a lot of people think that a lot of the photographs taken of farmsteads where you see people out with their horses, their cattle, their dogs, maybe a piano or organ in the yard, was to prove to the people that didn't come out and live here that they were surviving.

And that's it.

You had basically all your material things out here to make you look prosperous.

Collections like the Fent and Pratt photos help tell the story of a time and place.

This type of resource is invaluable for local historical societies in sharing and discovering the people and places of their past.

Hello, I'm Karen Lewis.

I'm the director at the Sheridan County Historical Society and Mickey's Museum in Hoxie, Kansas.

Today we're talking about photographs and some of the local photographers that came here years ago and how they may have impacted every community in the area.

They were taking pictures so that saves a timeline of photographs of people, events, happenings.

They tell a story about the communities and how they evolved over time.

So Nelson Long, he was a photographer and he moved out here and he went to school to be a photographer.

He actually went to Hill City some and we don't know if the Menlo people came into town or if he made a little satellite out there.

So he was here until 1943 when he died and his son was serving.

Bill.

Bill was a photographer during World War II because we have him with his camera.

He got to travel all over the world taking pictures out of planes and far off countries.

You know that years ago they only dreamed of.

Then there was the Anthony's, they were from the Selden area.

There was a few smaller photographers, Frank Fay and Frank Lee.

When we get something in, of course trying to preserve all these photos, we want to try to get them scanned into our processing.

If there are old photos that aren't in the best shape, we can maybe go in and make them clear for people to see.

Every photo that comes in has to have a number.

So every, you know, it's a process and you have to write who gave it, who donated it on the back.

When someone brings them in, we try to ask who might be involved in this family so that we can maybe put them in multiple files in our computers.

So in our Nelson Long photo collection, they were a bunch of, most of them were glass negatives, and we have over 3,000 that we had to clean and everything before we could even scan them.

I had to learn how to clean them with distilled water and a soft clean cloth.

There's the emulsion side that you don't want to put water on.

You just clean the glass slide and so you do that the best you can.

And so it took about a year and a half to scan all of those photos.

And so now we have the awesome ability to share them on our Facebook page and that way people can help us identify the pictures of people that we don't know.

So it's kind of started with our Ralph Beaker collection too because some of, Ralph Beaker was a photographer from 1970 until 2000.

He worked for the newspaper, but he also worked in an abstract office.

And so in his spare time, he took like senior pictures and events uptown.

And now we have his collection after he passed away and some of them are identified and some are not.

And so we've been putting them on and people from Arizona chime in and people from all over the United States.

So we sort them, label them.

If they have labels, which is always good, label your photos.

I'm sorry, that was a direct statement.

That was a direct command.

Label your photos because it will help or else you'll just be a picture that just gets thrown away.

Think about that.

If you don't label it, you'll be just maybe not even a memory.

This set of tin types came in just not very long ago.

And it's rather unique because it's one box and there's four photos in it.

This is the first one that I've seen like this before.

It's a couple and we believe this is their son in his Civil War uniform and this is him a little bit later.

It's very rare that we see them like this, we believe because usually they're just one photo like this.

This one must have been in a case at one time but the cases fell apart and so it's still in the glass.

You don't want to take it out of the glass.

You just leave it in the glass.

You can clean it on the outside but I mean, and if you have a tin type that isn't in a case then you really don't want to wipe it or clean it that way.

You just have to kind of get a little puffer and blow it because the static that can be caused because of what you're doing can make the emulsion pop off.

We just thought it would be a really cool idea because of photographs from Main Street and around town.

There's pictures of the businesses from 40 years ago and so we went ahead and went around to town and took all the pictures of all the businesses again.

We put them together then and now pictures.

We have QR codes that tell what was there then and what's there now or vice versa.

Then we have some flip ups things here too so that it's underneath.

We're trying to make it so anybody that could come in and uncover the story of Hoxie, Kansas.

When people come in to our museum they're usually looking for that family connection and so we had a young gentleman came in and he was thrilled to see his family's business on the wall.

We can relate to the travelers that come through that way and also the people that are looking for genealogy.

We've shared photos on our Facebook page and they say we've never seen that picture of my grandpa or grandma or something before or even their mom.

So when we share our pictures on our Facebook page we love the interaction that we get and also the interaction between the people that are talking or messaging.

Then they're going like well I haven't seen you in a long time where you at.

So it's getting those connections back with the people that they may have known 20, 30 years ago.

It's very heartwarming to know that we've made that impact in their life.

It would be a detriment for us not to have all these photographs because our building is small enough that we need to make it as impactful as possible and so we try to do that with our photographs to maybe instill a memory or an emotion because they can do that too.

photographs are very important.

There just aren't enough or they've been destroyed.

But they're very important because you hear that overused statement or really is not overused.

They're freezing a moment in time.

And so that moment is frozen in time.

The puppies not on the couch.

People we don't know but everyday activities.

With these photos they speak to you and if they could really speak to you more.

Why was he getting a haircut?

Was there a dance that night?

Was he going to go spark somewhere, court of lady?

The Studley Nine, a team picture.

Was it for the team or was it for some sort of advertisement?

We don't know.

The house pictures of course are there.

Sheep out in front, very desolate.

The house being complete.

The winter photo with trees around the house, big cottonwood trees that were planted in 1890.

But group pictures.

The moment in time the photographs how valuable they are so you really see what the people were wearing, what the conditions were like, what the area was like.