Book Information of Nellie E. Ladd.
Ellen Elizabeth Ladd, or as she signed her name, Nellie E. Ladd, amateur photographer, mother, wife, store owner, postal and elections clerk, lived in the northwestern California New River mining district from 1886 to 1921. She was one of the first American women to vote in 1920. Her photographic collection, including glass slides, negatives, prints and postcards, reveals a treasure of local cultural history centered around the town of Old Denny.
Nellie Ladd tells many stories of Old Denny and the New River Mining district of Northern California in her photography dating from about 1895 to 1920. In the region now known as the Trinity Alps Wilderness Area, nearly all the structures of the hardrock gold mining days have been lost to time, snow, mud slides, and forest fires. This absence makes Nellie Ladd's century-old photographs invaluable records of cultural as well as photographic history. They hold the secrets of ambition, family and community life, survival stories, mining techniques, and daily routine in a very uncommon world and in a magnificent setting. The changing perspective and use of the camera, evolving from glass plates to negatives, tell the history of amateur photography in the early stages of its development and distribution in isolated rural California.
A century later, a major corpus of her photographic works is preserved, interpreted, and shared with the wider public for the first time in this special edition photo-history of the gold mines and mining camps, as they were then and as they leave their traces today in the wilderness. There is also a hardback edition for $34.95.