Digitized by Library of Congress
Over the course of the spring and summer of 1866, a Cincinnati photographer named John Wildman Winder climbed to some of the highest elevations around the Queen City and created three breathtaking panoramas, preserving a record of our city as it existed in a long-lost age.
Unlike the far more famous daguerreotype panorama by Charles Fontayne and William S. Porter, documented to have been photographed on September 24, 1848, we do not know precisely when Winder exposed his images. We know the earliest possible date is March 25, because there is a huge gap in the skyline where Pike’s Opera House once stood. That venerable edifice burned on March 24. We may assume he finished the series around August 15, 1866, because the Library of Congress assigned a copyright to one of the panoramas on that date. In each of the panoramas, the Roebling Suspension Bridge, which did not open until later that year, appears near completion, but lacks its essential deck and roadbed.
Since we don’t know the exact order in which Winder captured his images, labelling them in order is entirely arbitrary. Let us begin with the images collected from atop the Suspension Bridge itself. The four albumen prints that constitute this panorama are preserved at the Library of Congress.
To create this spectacular series, Winder positioned his camera on the summit of the south tower of the bridge. From that vantage point, he made four images encompassing the entire riverfront from the Gas Works at the foot of Rose Street in the West End to the Water Works at the base of Mount Adams. Far in the distance to the east, we can see the hillsides of Mount Lookout and Columbia-Tusculum, with Bellevue, Kentucky peeking in from the other shore. To the west, we see Ludlow, Kentucky, with Price Hill in the background.
From "Cincinnati Historical Society Bulletin", Volume 25, No. 4, October 1967
Looking due north, to the west of the bridge, we see the foot of Vine Street and to the east of the bridge we get a good view up Walnut Street. There we identify the College Building, home to the Mercantile Library. On the Vine Street side, what appears to be another church steeple is, in fact, the city’s fire tower. Installed on the roof of the old Ohio Mechanics Institute on the corner of Sixth and Vine, Cincinnati’s relatively new professional fire department kept watch from this tower and assigned steam fire engines to respond by lighting color-coded lamps on the pole above the tower, while ringing the fire bell. To the west of Vine Street, we see some familiar spires that are still around today—St. Peter In Chains Cathedral and the Isaac M. Wise Temple. Their present-day neighbor, today’s City Hall, had not yet been constructed. Each of the four albumen prints is approximately 10 inches tall and 15 inches wide. Stitched together, the whole panorama is about five feet in width.
Almost simultaneously with the bridge panorama, Winder climbed up on the roof of Mozart Hall, located on Vine Street just south of Sixth and created another panorama by swiveling his camera a full 360 degrees to take in the totality of Cincinnati at that time. Writing in the Cincinnati Historical Society Bulletin [October 1967], Walter S. Glaser summarized the comprehensive nature of the 10 images that comprise this encompassing view:
“The panorama shows the entire Cincinnati basin and surrounding hilltops; eastward across Deer Creek to Mt. Adams, southward across the Ohio River to Covington and Newport, westward across the Mill Creek Valley to Price Hill, and northward across the Miami and Erie Canal to the Vine Street Hill and Mt. Auburn. Indeed, the field of the panorama includes over half of the entire corporate area of the city and most of the places where Cincinnatians lived, worked, and carried out their daily affairs a century ago.”
According to Glaser, The Cincinnati Historical Society displayed a 30-foot-long enlargement of all 10 panels of this panorama at the opening of Cincinnati’s Convention and Exposition Center in 1967.
Among the ten constituent images, we can see Mount Adams, the African-American enclave known as Bucktown and the East End with Kentucky behind. Looking southward down Vine Street, we see the nearly completed Suspension Bridge. Turning clockwise westward, we see the densely packed West End, the spires of St. Peter’s and Wise Temple (which was not formally dedicated until November of that year) and the imposing Sixth Street Market.
Winder’s third panorama of 1866, also preserved at the Library of Congress, involves seven albumen prints, each 9 inches high, of varying widths totaling 96.5 inches, or just over eight feet in width. The images were copyrighted on July 23, 1866 and were already on display at Winder’s gallery that week. The Cincinnati Gazette [July 21, 1866] describes the series:
“We saw, yesterday, at the photographic gallery of J.W. Winder & Co., a photographic view of Cincinnati and Covington taken from a point on the Kentucky side, opposite the Gas Works. It was taken in sections, but so well joined as to form one complete picture eight feet long. The sweep of the river is well shown, the suspension bridge appearing as an airy cobweb, while many of the prominent buildings in the city can be distinctly seen.”
Digitized by Library of Congress
Photographer Winder was not a Cincinnati native. He was born in 1828 in Chillicothe, Ohio, to a somewhat prominent Quaker family. He relocated to Cincinnati by 1855, setting up shop as a daguerreotypist at various studios around the city. Soon after arrival, Winder married Martha Adams and they had two sons, Lewis and Albert.
Photography was a relatively new technology at that time, having been invented just 15 years earlier in France. Winder advertised his studios with appropriately fanciful names such as “Winder’s Sky Light Gallery” and later the “National Art Palace.”
In addition to his trio of remarkable 1866 panoramas, Winder is the unsung documenter of the early days of Spring Grove Cemetery. Many of the iconic views of the cemetery prior to 1873 are his work, especially the stereoscopic cards prized by collectors. Early in his Cincinnati career, Winder had a contract with the city to photograph criminals for the police department.
Although he was an exceptional artist, Winder seemed to lack business savvy. He had to relocate his studio frequently, apparently for nonpayment of rent. He was also a tad absent-minded. On one occasion, the Enquirer reported that someone stole Winder’s camera while he was photographing Spring Grove Cemetery but, three days later, Winder placed a classified advertisement in the same paper, asking for help finding the camera he had lost. During the Civil War, he paid a substitute to enlist in his place when he was drafted, perhaps a reflection of his Quaker upbringing. Winder left Cincinnati and spent the rest of his life in the South, where he took up beekeeping and honey production. He died in New Orleans in 1900 at the age of 71.
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