1883 February 17 – 1967 July 22 – age 84
Edna E. Williams was born in Sterling in 1883. By the time she was 17, she had moved to the brick house on Ontario Street to help care for her maternal grandparents, Augusta and Sarah Kosboth Green.
At the turn of the century, Kodak was publishing ads such as this in magazines, showing a woman developing film in her home. They sold all of the necessary equipment and chemicals via mail-order. Perhaps an ad such as this inspired Edna to begin her career as a photographer. She started with glass negatives that she prepared herself and used sunlight to expose her prints. Several of her original glass plates survive today.
Eventually, she worked with large celluloid negatives and then 35mm film roles.
Do you remember Edna? Please share with us your memories of her or her photographs.
The Edna Williams Project is working toward cataloging Edna’s photographs and published postcards.
My Grandmother, Edna Williams
by June MacArthur
When looking at early 1900’s pictures of Fair Haven Bay, the old lighthouse on the west side, or the railroad trestle and ships down where the State Park is now, you probably didn’t realize the original photographer of many of those black and white photos was a small, very shy woman named Edna Williams. She was my step-grandmother. Edna’s only son, George Green, and my mother got together when I was about twelve years old and we moved into their big, brick house on Ontario Street at the top of Wilde Hill coming into Fair Haven. It had a cupola that their earlier relative, W. W. Green, a Custom House Officer used to watch for ships coming into Fair Haven.
Edna Williams, must have been in her late 70s when we moved in with her. She was very thin and had shrunk to under five feet tall. She had lots of cats and kittens about the farm, grew beautiful flower gardens, and had thousands of glass negatives in boxes everywhere. I was interested in photography, so we’d sit at the kitchen window and she’d show me her glass negatives by viewing them through the sunlight coming in the window.
She explained that she had printed pictures at that same kitchen window. She’d put a red light bulb on in the kitchen and have the trays of developer under the table. In the beginning days when she just did contact prints from the glass negatives, she’d raise the green shade and use the sunlight to expose the photo paper. But later she had an enlarger and used electric lights to expose her paper. I later joined the photography club at Red Creek High School. I’m afraid I wasn’t interested in the old ways she did things. Now, I wish I had asked more questions and paid more attention to what she did tell me. To be able to use her old cameras, and develop and print the photos the old way would be a treat!
She took many photos of the waters; around Fair Haven and Sterling, waterfalls at Sterling Center and Valley, of sailing ships and smoking steam vessels on Lake Ontario and coming into the Bay and loading coal at the train trestle, vacationing people touring by boat, horse buggy, train, and later by car. We still have many photos of the people of the community and schools. Her family, the Williams and Greens, as well as their house and formal rooms in the house, were greatly photographed. I could do several books just on the photos of the children and how people dressed in the Teens and Twenties of the 1900s. Farms, livestock, and people at work are shown through her camera lens.
George Green, her only child, was humbled when he told me how many hundreds of glass negatives he, Cliff Field, and other buddies destroyed when target practicing with guns and rocks. I hadn’t realize that she must have made some money from selling post cards of some of her photos. Charles Sweeting, a postcard collector, and historian, from Minetto, explained to me that she must have sent some of her photos to Germany. There they were made into postcards (some colored, some black and white) and she must have taken them around to stores to sell. In the 1920’s and 30’s, she often sent photos into the Syracuse Herald or Post Standard where she regularly won a dollar or two and they were published in the Sunday paper.