Leo J. Beachy photograph collection

Leo Beachy (1874-1927) was one of the ten children of Jonas and Anna Beachy of Mt. Nebo Farm, Garrett County, Maryland, near Grantsville. He attended normal school, and taught at one-room public schools in the area from 1895 to 1905.

A mysterious illness, posthumously diagnosed as multiple sclerosis, began to affect him as a teenager and eventually caused him to give up teaching. He lived on the family farm, augmenting his income with bee keeping and selling E.L. Kellogg’s educational magazine and books.

As a schoolboy, he was noted for his artistic ability. While teaching, he received a small Kodak camera with darkroom chemicals as a premium for selling books, but did not take up photography until the summer of 1905. He was immediately enthralled, “I had given more attention to fine art before than I realized and when I turned to the medium of the camera to give expression to my thoughts, it was so easy and delightful for me…” He avidly studied the work of contemporary photographers in periodicals such as American Photography and identified with the Pictorialist Movement.

As Beachy’s photographic skills grew, he “dreamed day dreams of a studio, with sky light, office, dark room, a large camera and a painted background.” A relative helped him build a darkroom in the farm’s springhouse; the spring provided water for washing the negatives and prints. He estimated that he processed 13,000 photographs in the last year that he used this little darkroom. He eventually achieved his dream—“The Mount Nebo Studio”, a simple frame building with skylight and glass wall. Family members recall the local population lining up after church on Sunday to have their portraits made at the farm studio.

Beachy inherited the devotion to nature that passed down from Ruskin and the Pre-Raphaelites to American writers such as Gene Stratton Porter (both Ruskin and Porter were included in his library.) He incorporated these ideas in a book he produced, Letters and Pictures for Isabelle. Illustrated with his photos, this little volume addressed a cousin who had moved to St. Louis, extolling the virtues of the rural life over the urban. Beachy’s photos won several awards during his lifetime and his work was published once in National Geographic magazine. Beachy’s illustrated articles were also published in local newspapers, as well as in magazines such as Motor Travel.

Over his career, Beachy returned again and again to the same subjects: the National Pike, the stone arch bridge over the Casselman River, the mountain vistas and groves of trees of Garrett County and Southern Pennsylvania. The best of his landscape photographs possess a gently graded tonal range and use of atmospheric perspective that capture perfectly the misty, subdued light of morning or evening in hill country. He also printed his landscape plates on postcard stock to sell at Grantsville stores.

In his studio, he posed his friends and neighbors, often in everyday clothes, before neutral backdrops or a wall of pressed tin. The studio furniture-chair and pedestals-that feature frequently in the portraits, are homemade. Although it is clear that Beachys’ heart was in his landscape work; his portraits, especially of children, have a charming spontaneity and folk art quality. The photographer’s empathy with his subjects shines through.