William Wallace Tooker was a 19th century historian and photographer who lived and worked in Sag Harbor. Though he made his living as a pharmacist, he was recognized as a leading authority on Coastal Algonquian culture and in 1911, wrote a well-respected book on Indian place names.
But Tooker was also keenly interested in the evidence of earlier times which he saw everywhere in Sag Harbor. He left a good deal of material behind him – not only photographs of architecture that was considered historic in his time, but also drawings and paintings of both rural and village life on the East End.
Fine art photographer Stephen Longmire used a good deal of Tooker’s architectural photographs as the inspiration for his 2007 book and photography exhibit, “Keeping Time in Sag Harbor.” But he feels there is still a great deal left to explore in Tooker’s work.
“I became aware of so much more of his material in researching the book and afterwards,” notes Longmire. “There’s a story to tell about a visual storyteller doing something that I was very much in sympathy with.”
This Friday, Longmire will be at the Sag Harbor Whaling & Historical Museum at 4 p.m. to share some seldom seen photographs, drawings and paintings by Tooker dating from 1870 to 1900. Longmire will also talk about objects on display at the Whaling Museum, including a portrait of Tooker as a child painted in the 1850s by his grandfather, Hubbard Latham Fordham and a photograph taken by Tooker of Montaukett Indian Stephen Pharaoh.
“I’m going to bring attention to things that are on display, but not often looked at,” Longmire notes.
While we often think of today’s painters and photographers who capture the rural and historic East End as documentarians in the face of a changing way of life, to Longmire, Tooker’s vision was more about archaeology and offering a complete picture of East End life.
“There are 1870s drawings, and photos from the 1890s. When you trace him across media, you get a rich history of what the East End was like,” he says. “The photos are indicative of his interest. Always an antiquarian, he was looking for memorable examples of early times on the East End.”
Windmills, notes Longmire, were of special interest to Tooker. Among Tooker’s photographs is one taken at Daniel Hildreth’s sawmill in the Seven Ponds area of Water Mill.
“It’s long gone,” says Longmire of the windmill. “It’s a marvelous picture, and it [the windmill] was probably an antique in Tooker’s day.”
“Photographers are often just one step ahead of the wrecking ball,” adds Longmire. “He saw his environment changing pretty radically in his lifetime.”
There was, indeed, much for Tooker to witness in the changing times of his day. Not only the Indian language and culture which was vanishing before his eyes and which Tooker sought to preserve in his writings, but many other ways of life as well.
“In 1848 he was born — right at the demise of whaling,” says Longmire. “He’s growing up in a community in decline, coming of age and making pictures at a moment when Sag Harbor is industrializing.”
In his photographs, Tooker pays close attention to Sag Harbor’s historic buildings. But what’s historic today was once cutting edge, and it’s interesting, notes Longmire, to look at what Tooker doesn’t choose to photograph. The Fahys watchcase factory, for example, appears only in the background of one his photographs.
“Same thing with the Whalers’ Church, which was relatively new in his lifetime,” adds Longmire. “He’s interested in points of contact of an earlier time — 18th century culture or older.”
Long Wharf and the Umbrella House on Division Street are just two of the subjects he focused on. Photography wasn’t easy in Tooker’s day, so he obviously had good reason for selecting the subjects he did, but he remained relatively silent on that reasoning.
For example, Tooker shot the Umbrella House twice, with several years between the two images, and in that time, notes Longmire, the building has changed along with the street level. Was it Tooker’s intention to use those two juxtaposed images to document that change or did something else catch his eye the second time around?
“We don’t have in a lot of information,” admits Longmire. “The photo of the Umbrella House that I’m going to show is the later one that’s not often reproduced. If you look closely, you can see [James A.] Hern’s play “Sag Harbor” is posted a playbill on the side of the building. There is also political signage on the building of an election. So I’d say it was 1900 or 1901.”
“It’s an image without a lot of information,” confesses Longmire who adds that he knows Tooker didn’t just choose to take series of random images.
It’s not only photographs that Longmire will be sharing of Tooker’s work on Friday, but his drawings and paintings as well. Several of the images come from a sketchbook by Tooker that is now in the collection of the John Jermain Memorial Library. Though both the photos and the drawings reflect what Tooker witnessed in his lifetime, Longmire believes that Tooker was working with those two mediums for different reasons.
“The drawings are of a younger man’s work, from the first part of the 1870s primarily,” explains Longmire. “I think they are much more of a young man’s effort to find out whether he’s an artist. He’s making them or polishing them up by copying them multiple times.”
“I think he’s practically decided to be a pharmacist. It’s a parlor game for him,” he adds. “There are some cases where the photographs, drawings and paintings are the same image done over time, but it’s rare. His skills as a draftsman are not overdeveloped, but very accurate. Part of why the drawings, including the book at the library, are so valuable is they do show us sites on the ground that we don’t have contact with. It’s information as well as artistry.”
Longmire, who plans to publish a small book based on Tooker’s visual material, sees the importance of his contribution not in individual pieces, but rather, as a body of work that ultimately reflects a picture of this area in a different time.
“I think it’s a look at the East End of Long Island through his eyes,” says Longmire. “He records in different media. I wouldn’t want to be in a situation of saying, ‘here is a vastly accomplished lost artist.’ Rather, here is a really aware visual historian who’s left us a variety of records.”
“You can’t understand one without looking at the rest,” he adds. “The common thread is the East End in his time. I think he was trying to visualize what wasn’t easy to see even then. He shows us what’s underground. Each of the formats of expression show in physical form something he was deeply interested in.”
Stephen Longmire’s talk “William Wallace Tooker: Sag Harbor historian, ethnographer & photographer,” begins at 4 p.m. on Friday, October 9 at the Sag Harbor Whaling & Historical Museum, 200 Main Street, Sag Harbor. For more information, call 725-0770.
Above: William Wallace Tooker’s photograph of Sag Harbor’s Umbrella House (above) circa 1900.
