“J.E. Stimson” is a part of the Capitol Avenue Bronze public art collection . . donated to the City of Cheyenne by private individuals, organizations or companies. For more information about the Capitol Avenue Bronze Project, visit Deselms Fine Art at https://deselmsfineart.com
Joseph Elam Stimson, a photographer by craft, is Wyoming’s greatest visual historian. For 60 years, he captured the people, landscapes and townscapes, railroads and factories, bridges, livestock, libraries and breweries, and rivers and roads of the city of Cheyenne and the state of Wyoming so comprehensively and richly that it’s hard to imagine his accomplishment ever being matched. From the 1890s to the 1950s, the period after the American West had definitively been “closed” to new exploration and began to develop its distinctive form of society, Stimson avidly captured it. Wyoming was his canvass.
J.E. Stimson – as he was commonly known – was born in 1870 in Brandy Station, Culpepper County, Virginia. He spent part of his childhood in the Appalachian Mountains in Spartanburg County, South Carolina. His father William, a physician, and mother Maria moved Stimson and his six siblings to Pawnee, Nebraska. His father died when Stimson was 16 and he soon moved to Appleton, Wisconsin to apprentice with his cousin, a photographer.
Two of his brothers worked for the railroad in Cheyenne. It appears that he followed them to Cheyenne, arriving in the city in 1889, where he bought his first camera and a studio for $500. Wyoming was still a territory. Statehood would come in 1890. Within his first year or so in Cheyenne, Stimson met and captured the picture of Anna Catherine Peterson, age 16, who would become his wife when she was 19. They had three sons and a daughter. Their house in Cheyenne stood on the ground now occupied by the state’s Herschler Building, just north of the Capitol.
The hinge moment for Stimson’s career – and the propitious moment for all who cherish the visual history of Wyoming – came when Elwood Mead, the first state engineer of Wyoming, came into Stimson’s studio to get glass negatives of the Big Horn Mountains developed. Stimson asked Mead if Wyoming had other such great history. Mead exclaimed that the Big Horns were but a small sample of the state’s scenic magnificence. Stimson later recalled that his visit with Mead changed his life. In 1901, the Union Pacific hired him to be its publicity photographer, hoping to burnish its reputation after bankruptcy and to encourage travel to the west.
For 60 years, Stimson travelled the state with an artist’s eye and an appetite for seemingly everything from natural to manmade. After his death, Governor Frank Barrett and the legislature arranged for the purchase of more than 7,500 of Stimson’s negatives. They are now preserved in State Archives and available for the public to see.
Stimson died, age 82, in Hartford, Connecticut and is buried in Lakeview Cemetery in Cheyenne.
To learn more about the Capitol Avenue Bronze Project, visit this link . For more information about each artist, sponsoring a bronze, or becoming a donor/supporter at any level, please contact Harvey Deselms at Deselms Fine Art, located at 303 E. 17th Street Cheyenne. Email is deslemsart@aol.com or call at 307 432 0606
