Nostalgia & History > Edward A. Bromley

Date: 01/23/20 12:55
Edward A. Bromley
Author: flynn

The photographer of picture 3 on my previous posting, Railroad Rock Island, was Edward A. Bromley. The picture was of ticket agents of the Rock Island Railroad. [Did these ticket agents sell tickets at stations along the Rock Island or were these traveling salesmen who sold the Rock Island to other railroads.?] I thought that picture 3 was a remarkable picture. I did a Google search for Edward A. Bromley and found in the Hennepin County Library a website of the Edward A. Bromley Collection with 1,143 pictures.

https://digitalcollections.hclib.org/digital/collection/p17208coll18

From the library, “Edward A. Bromley was born in New Haven, Conn. September 24, 1848. He died in Minneapolis on June 21, 1925, at the age of 76.
Bromley arrived in Minnesota with his parents in 1867, first living in St. Paul and later Minneapolis. He worked as a news reporter and photographer for the St. Paul Pioneer Press, where he gained interest in chronicling history, particularly American Indian history. He transferred to the Minneapolis edition of the Pioneer Press in 1877 and began working for the Minneapolis Journal in 1894.
After a failed attempt to collect coins, Bromley embarked on a life-long project to collect photographs and negatives of the pioneer days in Minnesota. His first purchase of negatives was from Benjamin F. Upton of St. Anthony, from whom he purchased over 500 negatives in 1878 when Upton relocated to Florida. He also purchased 1600 view negatives from William H. Illingworth’s gallery in St. Paul. During his first ten years of collecting, Bromley purchased the negatives and plates of 30 other photographers (including Pepper, Jacoby, Rugg, and Harvey) totaling about 7000 negatives.
Bromley’s collection included photographs taken by himself as well. He had a particular interest in American Indians and would take one of his cameras and go out among the tribes, looking for feature stories. He also took photographs of prominent Minnesota men. In 1898 Bromley was sent with the Minnesota troops as a correspondent of the Spanish-American war for the Minneapolis Times.
In 1900 Bromley published a book of his collected photographs, ‘Minneapolis Album: A Photographic History of the Early Days in Minneapolis, A Collection of Views Illustrative of the City's Growth from the Earliest Settlement Down to 1880, With Accompanying Descriptive Matter and Portraits of Pioneer Citizens, Forming A Complete Historical Picture.’
Edward Bromley sold a portion of his collection, consisting of approximately 200 lantern slides and 1600-1800 glass plate negatives, to the Minneapolis Public Library in 1914. In the 1960s, photographer Harold E. Vanderwater reproduced over 325 of the Bromley plates for the Minneapolis History Collection by carefully selecting, patching, retouching, and reproducing the originals. Additional acetate negatives and reproduction prints were made in the 1980s. Preservation prints of the Illingworth images was done in collaboration with the Minnesota Historical Society in 1991. From 2015 to 2017 the original glass plate negatives were cleaned, repaired, re-scanned, and placed in new preservation enclosures.”

I did a search of the collection for Railroad and limited the number to 101. The picture of the Rock Island Railroad ticket agents is in the collection. It is the only picture of the Rock Island Railroad.

Picture 1, A New Soo Line Locomotive.