Rescued From Dilapidated Sag Harbor Barn, Howard Photos Appear in New Limited Edition Book

William G. Howard, who had a photography studio at Main and Washington streets in Sag Harbor during a tumultuous period in American history, carried his bulky view camera about the East End and trained his lens on everything from special community occasions to mundane street views, from scenes of the leisure class at play to candid images of members of the working class, taking a break from their labors.

Today, many of those photographs have been released in a limited edition coffee table book, “Hamptons: 1882-1915,” by Randy Kolhoff, the owner of Black Swan Antiques, who now owns the images. He released the book at a reception at his store on Main Street in the village on Friday, July 8.

The book includes more than 200 full-page reproductions of Howard’s work, with little in the way of accompanying text. Only 500 copies of the book, which is being sold for $275, will be printed.

To hear Kolhoff tell it, that the mostly 5-inch-by-7-inch glass plate negatives the prints were made from still exist is something of a miracle.

Like most antiques dealers, Kolhoff is always on the lookout for rare finds. A Sag Harbor man would occasionally come to the shop with an intriguing piece that Kolhoff would buy for his inventory. He later learned that most of what the client brought in had come from a barn behind a house on Amity Street, right in Sag Harbor.

About three years ago, Kolhoff said the owner of the property called him up and asked him to take a look at her dilapidated barn and make an offer for all of its contents. They settled on a price, and he and his assistant began the arduous task of picking through the piles of stuff — some well preserved, some ready for the dump.

In the back of the barn, he came across a startling find: literally thousands of glass-plate negatives. Some had shattered when the wood crates they had been stored in collapsed from rot, but others were in excellent condition. There were also piles of photographs identified as having been made by Howard.

Kolhoff checked with the family to see if the photographs had any personal value to them, but he was told they did not. So he started the slow, arduous process of cleaning the glass plates, setting them up in a lightbox and photographing them, using Photoshop to make prints from the negatives.

“I literally got chills up and down my spine every time I saw an image,” Kolhoff said. “I’m a history buff, and I like to imagine what things were like, and these photographs are great for that.”

Like many photographers of that era, Howard did portraits of both individuals and families, but he also made photographs of some of the new summer cottages being built on the East End, and he chronicled the construction of new commercial buildings and the erection of new monuments in local villages.

Other times, he just captured images of empty street scenes. Among the Sag Harbor photographs are images of the Alvin Building, a silver factory that once stood on the site of today’s Sag Pizza and the Sylvester & Company store, and the newly constructed Peconic Bank Building, which is now Apple Bank.

Howard also photographed events such as the dedication of a flagpole at the foot of Long Wharf and a similar ceremony at the war monument on Montauk Highway and Ocean Road in Bridgehampton.

Although most of his photographs are staged — a line of hunters, for instance, with their game in hand — some are candid.

Among those is a photograph of a group of people, women in full-length dresses, men in pants and shirts, playing lawn tennis. A bearded man, standing in the background, who is obviously the groundskeeper, holds a scythe, and resembles the Grim Reaper overseeing a particularly high-stakes match.

He also captured scenes of everyday life. There’s an image of a working-class family, some of the children without shoes, standing in front of their small cottage. Another image shows a group of workers sitting on their horse-drawn wagon next to the Fahys Watchcase Factory.

“People now so often get lost in the glitz of the Hamptons,” Kolhoff said, noting that Howard seemed to enjoy documenting day-to-day life as much as he did taking formal portraits.

One striking fact about Howard’s images is how well they stand up when enlarged. Kolhoff has made a number of prints that are 3 feet by 5 feet, or even larger, with next to no pixelation.

Ironically, Kolhoff said when he began to make photographs of the negatives, he used a professional camera and an assortment of lenses. But unhappy with the results, he resorted to — what else? — his iPhone.