3. Fannie Benjamin Johnston and Drumthwacket

       The lush gardens of the “Moses Taylor Pyne house”, as Drumthwacket (NJ’s Governor’s mansion in Princeton, NJ) was then called, were a featured subject for Frances (Fannie) Benjamin Johnston in the early 1900s. Johnston, one of the first professional woman photographer and photojournalist in the US, established a reputation for portraiture among the affluent and influential of Washington, DC high society in the late 19^th and early 20^th century. At the turn of the 19^th century, Johnston became engaged with the “City Beautiful”/“Garden Beautiful” movements. These movements were, in large part, a reaction to the rapid industrialization and crowded urbanization of the American landscape that came with the affluence of the Gilded Age.

 

       Originally hired to document the new “row house” lots and growing number of formal gardens on estates as new design models, Johnston became a passionate advocate in the movement to beautify America. These images of Drumthwacket (taken around 1906) were among the hand-colored slides she featured in her talk “Our American Gardens,” which was given to groups throughout the nation.



       Moses Taylor Pyne, an industrialist and banker, purchased Drumthwacket from the widow of Charles Smith Olden, the estate’s original owner, in 1893. Money was no object for this successful industrialist. He and his wife Margaretta Stockton Pyne (of the Morven Stocktons) added hundreds of acres to the existing estate, bringing in noted landscape architect Daniel Webster Langton (NJ native and a founding member of the American Society of Landscape Architects) to create the formal Italian gardens that visitors to Drumthwacket may enjoy to this day.

For insight on how hand colored glass slides like Johnston’s were made, see this article by John Tennant in an 1899 issue of The Photo Miniature