Sam Cooley's Wagons

Two wagons stand in churned sand before a picket fence and a frame house, each carrying a painted board. The lettering is legible at full size and reads, in full: SAM A. COOLEY. U.S. Photographer. Department of the South. A camera on its tripod stands at the right of the second wagon; five men are in the frame, and one of them is almost certainly the proprietor.

This site's photographer record for Cooley says he advertised as U.S. Photographer, Department of the South, and as Photographer Tenth Army Corps — the claim is verified there, and here is the advertisement itself, painted on the side of a mud-caked wagon in a war zone. He was a sutler by trade, never enlisted, and worked the department with a mobile darkroom because wet collodion cannot travel any other way: the plate must be coated, exposed and developed before it dries.

The Library of Congress gives no location for the plate. The wagons are the subject wherever they stood.