1857 -1865
A famous 1800’s photographer named Benjamin Franklin Upton lived in Big Lake for about 8 years according to the Minnesota Historical Society. According to the 1860 Big Lake census he owned $2000 worth of property and $300 in personal property. Bonus points to anyone who can figure out where his home was!
Upton was a daguerreian and inventor who worked in Bath Maine from 1855-1856 and was also listed as working in Chicago, Illinois; and St. Anthony, Minnesota.
When Upton came to Minnesota he did not set up a studio in the city as most other photographers of the time had done, perhaps because of his propensity for field work and the fact that he was not a portrait photographer. For about eight years he lived at Big Lake in Sherburne County 1857-1865) and spent his summers at Lake Minnetonka, where he took the first photos made of that lake. The Minnesota Historical Society has a collection of his photos of Minnehaha Falls, the prisoner’s of the Souix Uprising, early Minneapolis, Fort Snelling and the red river carts. He lived in St. Anthony from 1865 to 1875 and then moved to Florida, pursuing his vocation with a photo trip by boat along the Indian River and a tour via railroad handcar following the eastern shore of Florida.
In 1853 he received a patent for a mercury bath for daguerreotyping, and in 1854, a patent for an apparatus for polishing daguerreotype plates.
Mentioned in a MNHS article on nineteenth century photographers.
http://collections.mnhs.org/MNHistoryMagazine/articles/52/v52i02p042-060.pdf
Pioneer Photographers from the Mississippi to the continental divide: a biographical dictionary, 1839 – 1865 /Peer E. Palmquist, Thomas R. Kailbourn
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