Lou’s View

By Lou Bernard

Talent shows up in unexpected places.

There are people out there with surprising amounts of a variety of talents—They can write, sing, draw, install telephones, etc., and they never make a big deal of it. You’d never realize it, to look at them, but they have this untapped well of talent that’s imperceptible, until you see them use it.

Annie Snyder was one of these.

Annie Snyder was born in Salona in 1852. Growing up on a small farm, she began painting as a child. Initially, she painted using leftover barn paint on stray boards, many of which were still attached to the barn at the time. As she grew up, she displayed an intense artistic talent, and went into art as a career with very little formal training.

Annie moved into Lock Haven and got a studio on the second floor of a building that no longer stands—It was at the parking lot across from the Fallon Hotel. She painted mostly still-life paintings of fruit, farm animals and scenes, and bucolic-looking outdoor areas.

Often, Annie would gather up some of her paintings and sell chances on winning them at a quarter a shot, which is $2,600 by today’s standards. It was a common sight to find Annie Snyder walking around Lock Haven with several pf her paintings under her arm. She would sell her talent to people who needed art, some of them pretty high-profile, such as Henry Shoemaker, who presented two of Annie’s portraits of local judges to the courthouse as a Christmas gift. (If you don’t know who Henry Shoemaker is, read another one of my columns. Practically any column.) Annie once was hired to paint a huge picture of Jesus herding sheep for a local church, and charged them accordingly. Once they found out how much it would cost, the comment was made that it might have been cheaper if they’d asked for the sheep to be shorn.

Annie also developed a habit of signing paintings that were not, in a technical sense, her own work. In at least one documented case, she was visiting a neighbor who was also a painter. Seeing a painting of cows in a field, very similar to her own paintings, Annie commented,”I see I forgot to sign that painting,” and scribbled a signature on it.

Annie was so talented that she got a job with the college at one point, around 1900, teaching art to the incoming students. At the time it was the Central State Normal School, not Lock Haven University, but the idea was the same.

One of our local history books describes Annie Snyder’s first car ride. Another local artist, Paul Welch, had recently gotten a car—This was when they were a new fad, and very few people had one. Driving home from Mill Hall, Welch saw Annie walking with some of her paintings, and stopped to offer her a ride.

With some persuasion, a hesitant Annie finally got in the car. As he crested the hill at Bellefonte Avenue, Welch hit the car’s top speed, a breathtaking fifteen miles per hour. He continued at this rate all the way to the bottom of the hill, scaring the hell out of Annie.

Annie Snyder died in 1927. Her paintings today are often auctioned for high prices, considerably above the quarters she was charging. She was buried in Cedar Hill Cemetery, out in Lamar Township, not far from where she was born. Her gravestone lists her name, birth and death dates….And it has her signature on it, much like many of the paintings she did….And at least one that she didn’t.