George N. Barnard

Barnard was born at Coventry, Connecticut, on 23 December 1819 and began working in photography in the 1840s. For the first two years of the war he worked under Mathew Brady; in late 1863 the Union army employed him directly, and he became official photographer to the Military Division of the Mississippi.

He published sixty of his views of the Atlanta campaign, Nashville, Savannah, Columbia and Charleston in Photographic Views of Sherman’s Campaign in 1866 — one of the great photographic books of the century.

Between 1868 and 1871 he was back in Charleston, in partnership with the Quinby & Co. studio at 261 King Street. After a spell in Chicago he returned again in 1873 for seven more years of work before moving to Rochester, New York. He died at Syracuse on 4 February 1902.

Barnard’s Charleston pictures date from the spring of 1865, when he spent several weeks in the city — a city that had been shelled for five hundred and eighty-seven days, burned in 1861, and evacuated in February. What he made there is the fullest photographic account of the place in ruins.

His album includes three views of Fort Sumter after nearly two years of Federal bombardment. He photographed the ground destroyed in the great fire of 11 December 1861 — the Pinckney mansion on East Bay Street, the Circular Congregational Church in scaffolding and under reconstruction — and the wreck of the Northeastern Depot, blown up during the Confederate evacuation of 17–18 February 1865.

He also photographed Sam Cooley at work on the parapet of Fort Sumter, which is how we know what a field photographer and his wagon looked like in April 1865.

Civilian employee of the United States army from late 1863, after two years with Brady. Official photographer to the Military Division of the Mississippi.

Wet-plate glass negatives, including stereo pairs cut from single plates — the Library of Congress’s Charleston negatives of April 1865 are two-plate stereo glass, wet collodion, and its catalog notes which half is which.

Barnard is the best-attributed photographer in this section — the Library of Congress carries his name and dates in its authority record — and even so, most of the April 1865 Charleston negatives in LOT 4166-C have no creator in the catalog at all. Where the Library credits him, this site credits him. Where it does not, the attribution is recorded as the book’s and marked as such.