Lou’s View

By Lou Bernard

Among the information requests I get, one of the more common ones is a request for photos. People come to me asking for old photos all the time. Though they don’t realize it, the requests generally have something of an entitled feel to them. It’s usually something like this:

“Hey, I need a photo of my house. I need to know how it looked in 1917, so get me that picture. Also I need it by Thursday.”

And I usually have to put the brakes on it right there. Historical research is not Burger King; you can not necessarily have it your way.

See, photos aren’t like deeds or wills. There is nothing that requires them to be preserved or displayed. Hell, nothing requires them to be taken in the first place. So a photo of a specific building from a specific time can get pretty chancy.

If you find one in Lock Haven, though, chances are it’s due to J.W.C. Floyd.

Floyd was a photographer. John Wilbur Clarence Floyd was born in 1852 in Cincinnati. In 1881, he moved to Lock Haven, which at the time was well-known as a good place to set up a local business. He took over the photography business of F.W. Wood, located in the Hecht Building at 13 East Main Street. (You might know this as present-day Beiter’s.)

The first record of Floyd actually taking a photo in Lock Haven was on Thanksgiving Day in 1881. The twenty-three members of the local Seltzer Coronet Band had their photo taken at his studio, and as far as I know, that’s his earliest job in Lock Haven.

Floyd got popular through sheer volume, essentially. He was a talented photographer, but mainly took a lot of photos of Lock Haven. Every square inch, from every conceivable angle. Hundreds of them. If you can find an old photo of Lock Haven, chances are it’s a Floyd photo.

He married Erma Gast in 1883, but on December 14, 1889, she died of Typhoid Fever probably caused by the 1889 flood. She died within a day of her father, and the two of them were buried together in Highland Cemetery after a double funeral.

By 1890, Floyd was advertising that he had all the latest photographic technology, which in those days probably meant that you only had to hold still for twenty minutes instead of a full hour. At one point he released a sixteen-foot-long balloon as an advertising stunt, except it promptly caught fire and burned up. He wound up awarding the prize to the man who found the biggest remnant of the balloon.

His second wife Jessie died in 1896 after four years of marriage, and he married Blanche Bickford, who was a retoucher for his work. She stuck around, and the two of them had over twenty years of marriage.

Floyd took on the young Henry Swope as his assistant, and when he decided to leave town in 1906, Swope took over the business, much like Floyd had from Wood earlier. Swope was a good photographer, though he didn’t race around Lock Haven taking photos of every single building the way Floyd had.

Floyd moved to Pueblo, Colorado, where he continued his career and later went into filming. He died there on March 10, 1930, and was buried in Roselawn Cemetery.

So if you come to me asking for a specific photo, I can’t guarantee to get you the exact one you want. But I can make a pretty good attempt at one, thanks to J.W.C. Floyd and all of his free time to run around town with a camera.