140

Mathew Brady.

Photograph of his darkroom "What-Is-It" wagon.

City Point, VA, circa summer 1864
Albumen photograph, 3¼ x 4 inches, on early mount, with manuscript caption "Photographer's Outfit, City Point, Va.", with later caption stickers on verso; pinhole and minor wear to mount.

This photograph appears in Miller's Photographic History of the Civil War, page 8:25, with the caption "In the early years of the war the soldiers were so mystified by the peculiar-looking wagon in which Brady kept his traveling dark-room that they nicknamed it the 'What-Is-It?' wagon, a name which clung to the photographer's outfit all through the war. [This] photograph, with the two bashful-looking horses huddling together before the camera, shows Brady's outfit going to the front, in 1861." It also appears as image 97 in Roy Meredith's 1974 compilation, "Mr. Lincoln's Camera Man: Mathew B. Brady," placing the date as summer of 1864. That date seems more likely than 1861, as City Point was a major Union base during the siege of Petersburg toward the end of the war.

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