Charleston photographers, Studio portraitists

George Smith Cook

Charleston’s leading photographer of the Civil War era, and the man who carried a camera onto the parapet of Fort Sumter under fire in September 1863. He came to King Street in 1849 by way of New Orleans and Newark, built the city’s most successful gallery, and lost his stored wartime negatives in the burning of Columbia.

Cook was born at Stratford, Connecticut, on 23 February 1819, orphaned young, and raised at Newark, New Jersey by his maternal grandmother. At fourteen he went west to the Ohio River and worked his way south; by early 1838 he was in New Orleans painting portrait miniatures. When the daguerreotype arrived in 1839 he learned it, and by the early 1840s was managing a gallery.

What followed was a pattern he repeated for a decade: set up a studio in a southern town, train a successor, sell him the business, keep supplying him with stock, and move on. It made Cook a network as much as a photographer, and the network is part of why he prospered.

In October 1849 he settled his family in Charleston and stopped moving. The King Street studio became one of the best-known in the country; he finished his portraits with pencil to warm the flesh tones, and he ran a lucrative trade in photographic supplies out of the same premises. Mathew Brady thought well enough of him to hand him the New York gallery for the summer of 1851 while Brady traveled in Europe. Cook bought a competing gallery at the same time, and went back to Charleston when Brady returned.

He learned the wet-plate process during the 1850s and by 1855 was producing prints, stereographs and cartes de visite that E. & H. T. Anthony & Co. of New York bought and sold widely. In 1860 he paid $5,000 for two tracts on South Battery and built a three-story house on them.

Early in 1864 Cook moved his family toward Columbia, where his wife died that April. He had stored much of his equipment, with negatives and business records, in a temporary gallery in the city. All of it burned in February 1865 — which is the single largest reason the surviving Confederate photographic record of Charleston is as thin as it is.

He reopened in Charleston after the war and worked on through the 1870s. In 1880 he bought David H. Anderson’s Richmond studio outright — equipment, backdrops and some twenty thousand glass negatives, including Anderson’s wartime portraits of Confederate officers — and moved to Virginia. He mastered the dry plate in his sixties, offered every sitter three sittings and took no payment until they were satisfied, and died at Bon Air on 27 November 1902, two days after a stroke. He is buried in Hollywood Cemetery, Richmond.

The Charleston connection

Cook is the Charleston photographer of the war in the way no one else is: he was established in the city for eleven years before it began, he stayed through most of it, and he had the standing to get where the pictures were.

In February 1861 he photographed Major Robert Anderson, commanding the Federal garrison at Fort Sumter. The carte de visite sold by the thousand that spring. During the war he photographed troops, prisoners, installations and destruction around Charleston, and the David-type semi-submersible torpedo boats.

On 8 September 1863 he set his camera on the parapet of Fort Sumter while Union monitors were firing on it, and made the plates his reputation now rests on.

War service and standing

No commission, no contract, no uniform. The Dictionary of Virginia Biography records that Cook served in the home guard, continued his trade, ran supplies through the blockade successfully, and took payment in gold.

His access to Fort Sumter and to Confederate camps was the access of a well-known local businessman with official goodwill, not of an appointed army photographer. That is a different thing from Sam Cooley’s self-awarded federal title or Philip Haas’s enlistment, and this section keeps the three apart.

Process and equipment

Cook worked through three generations of process — daguerreotype in the 1840s, wet collodion from the 1850s, dry plate after 1880 — and sold the chemistry and apparatus for all of them. The wet plate is the one that matters for Charleston: a glass plate coated, sensitized, exposed and developed while still wet, which meant the darkroom had to travel with the camera.

A hand-colored effect of an exploding shell in one of his best-known harbor pictures was, in the Dictionary of Virginia Biography’s judgment, likely the result of significant retouching. It is a caution worth carrying into every dramatic wartime photograph.

Attribution

Two claims attach to Cook that need handling carefully.

The first is the birthplace. The Dictionary of Virginia Biography and Davis and Melton both give Stratford, Connecticut. The National Park Service gives Stamford. This site follows the Dictionary of Virginia Biography, which cites family documents, and records the disagreement rather than hiding it.

The second is “the first combat photograph”. The National Park Service says of 8 September 1863 that Cook captured what are considered history’s first combat photographs; the Dictionary of Virginia Biography says he was the first to photograph Union ironclads in action. Haas & Peale photographed the same engagement from Morris Island that morning, and Davis and Melton note that the historian Jack Thomson gave that plate the same distinction. The honest position is that two cameras recorded the same fight from opposite shores on the same day, and that which shutter opened first cannot be established from what survives.

Career

Do not confuse with

  • George LaGrange Cook — His elder son, born 1849, who ran the Charleston studio after the war and whose glass negatives of Charleston date from the 1880s and 1890s. Not a wartime photographer.
  • 265 King Street, then and now — Ford’s census of 1861 puts George S. Cook at 265 King Street, and a building at 265 King today is associated with a Cook studio — the son’s, of the later 1880s. King Street was renumbered twice between those dates, so the matching numbers prove nothing. Do not write that the father’s wartime gallery survives at 265 King.
  • Huestis Pratt Cook — His younger son by his second marriage, also a photographer, in Richmond.
  • Samuel A. Cooley — A different man on the other side, in Charleston Harbor at the same period. Cook and Cooley are constantly confused.

Representative works

Working locations

Where the work is

  • Dictionary of Virginia Biography The Valentine, Richmond, holds the Cook Collection, bought in 1946 and 1954 — the work of George S. Cook and of his sons George LaGrange and Huestis Pratt Cook, with historical images they acquired from other studios.
  • Library of Congress The George S. Cook Papers are at the Library of Congress.

See also

James M. Osborn George LaGrange Cook Samuel Abbot Cooley Philip Haas

Statement by statement

Every material claim on this page, with its standing and its source. A statement the record does not support is shown as unavailable rather than filled in.

Sources

  • “George Smith Cook (23 February 1819–27 November 1902),” Dictionary of Virginia Biography, Library of Virginia, Richmond. https://old.lva.virginia.gov/public/dvb/bio.asp?b=Cook_George_Smith
  • “George Cook,” Fort Sumter and Fort Moultrie National Historical Park, National Park Service (page last updated 17 June 2015). https://www.nps.gov/people/george-cook.htm
  • Stephen Davis and Jack W. Melton Jr., 100 Significant Civil War Photographs: Charleston in the War (Charleston: Historical Publications LLC, 2020).
  • John S. Craig, Craig’s Daguerreian Registry (Torrington, Conn.: John S. Craig), consulted through Pioneer American Photographers.
  • Pioneer American Photographers, 1839–1860 — a compilation of period advertisements, directory entries and registry records, with each entry citing the periodical or directory it came from. https://pioneeramericanphotographers.com/
  • Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. https://www.loc.gov/pictures/
  • Frederick A. Ford, Census of the City of Charleston, South Carolina, for the Year 1861, Illustrated by Statistical Tables, Prepared under the Authority of the City Council (Charleston, 1861). The street lists give, for every house on every street, the number, the owner and the occupant. https://archive.org/details/censusofcityofch00char
  • 1967 King Street Survey Collection and Photograph Survey of the “Charleston Center” Site, Historic Charleston Foundation, digitized by the Lowcountry Digital Library, College of Charleston. Copyright © Historic Charleston Foundation; all rights reserved. https://lcdl.library.cofc.edu/lcdl/
  • City Engineer’s Plat Book, 1671–1951, City of Charleston, on permanent loan to The Charleston Archive at Charleston County Public Library; digitized by the Lowcountry Digital Library, College of Charleston. Public domain; contact The Charleston Archive for reuse requirements. https://lcdl.library.cofc.edu/lcdl/