PBA Galleries

Includes:

• African-American male. ( J.C. Parker’s Gallery, Pekin, Illinois;  with 1862-71 IRS stamp affixed.
• African-American male, possibly wearing a riding uniform. (G.I.Hazeltine, Canyon City, Oregon)
• CDV sized [Ferrotype?]  of a beautiful woman, possibly an African-American of mixed race. (On verso: “Gem Miniatures, taken with the New Invented Camera”… / Card Ferrotype / J.E.James, Utica, New York)
• African-American male, unidentified, but believed, by historical evidence, to be Gabriel (Gabe) Giger, “the first Black person to vote” in Ottawa, Illinois, west of Chicago, in 1870. ([W.E.]Bowman, Ottawa, Illinois)

Parker took many photos of Civil War soldiers. George Hazeltine and his brother Martin, “one of the more famous early California photographers”, operated a daguerreotype studio together in San Francisco during the Gold Rush. By the Civil War, Martin went off to work in Sacramento and Mendocino, while George had moved to rural Oregon James was active during and after the Civil War. “Gabe” Giger, was born a slave in Louisiana in 1848, coming to Illinois according to legend, via the Underground Railroad. He worked as a manual laborer, was literate, married to a free Black woman and had 3 daughters.  After the Civil War, the town of Ottawa was dominated by Democrats who attempted to prevent Giger from voting the Republican ticket. A bi-partisan group of local lawyers insisted to hostile city authorities that he was legally qualified to vote, and when his ballot was at last accepted, William Emory Bowman, the town’s best-known photographer reportedly “took Gabe to his gallery and photographed him as Ottawa’s ‘the first colored voter’”.With: Spiral-bound book, James Jensen, “W.E.Bowman / General Photographer”, 105pp., with many reproductions of Bowman photos, but none of Giger.