Echo City, from the South, Utah

ANDREW JOSEPH RUSSELL (1830-1902)

Echo City, from the South, Utah

1869

Russell, chief photographer for the Union Pacific Railroad, made one of the famous photographs of the ceremony joining the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific Railroads at Promontory, Utah, on May 10, 1869. Following that event, Russell took an excursion to photograph Echo City, Utah, an important Union Pacific boomtown northeast of Salt Lake City. Russell quit the railroad later in 1869 and returned to the East. The Union Pacific paymaster acquired all of his railroad negatives, and they then fell into the hands of Stephen J. Sedgwick, a traveling "professor" who illustrated his lectures with lantern slides. Russell's railroad photographs were published as stereographs, book and album illustrations, lantern slides, and other formats. The photograph here is mounted on the verso of an advertisement for Robert Wood & Co., an ornamental iron works in Philadelphia.

Albumen print

Princeton Collections of Western Americana, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections. Purchase, J. Monroe Thorington Fund.