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Yale likely would have been merely a footnote in Newport’s history were it not for his passion for photography. In 1921, Yale, 56, at the time, documented the people, homes, farms, factories and other rural scenes in Newport in nearly 200 glass lantern slides that he donated to the Richards Free Library when he returned to town briefly in the late 1930s.
The slide collection was digitized by New London archivist James Perkins earlier this year and made into a book titled Photographs of Newport and North Newport Taken by Rev. David Yale — 1921.
“It is a terrific snapshot of the town,” said Perkins. “I teach historic preservation at Plymouth State and use the slides as a case study. They are a fabulous collection.”
The book is divided into groups of photos based on location. The first 50 are titled “South Section of Town” and include farms, schoolhouses, the golf course and several families.
The next section of 40 photographs is of young children to adolescents and teachers of the Cradle School at the South Church. There are two photos of the Goshen Four Corners School, followed by about 90 from North Newport. The last three are of Croydon. Yale identified each image with names and locations.
Perkins and Newport’s archivist, Mary Lou McGuire, have pondered how Yale chose his subjects and have concluded he had no specific agenda regarding whom and what he wanted to portray.
“He was an avid photographer and I think he just wanted to document the town at that time,” said McGuire. “He was a traveling minister and did the same thing in other places.”
Perkins said Yale resigned as a minister in Newport in 1923, for health reasons, shortly after the meetinghouse in town marked its centennial. He and his wife were the first ones to live in the church’s parsonage. Yale also served in Ellsworth and Bath, Maine, and Talcottville, Conn., before retiring. He died in Connecticut in 1950 at age 85.
In his research, Perkins discovered that Yale documented life in Enfield, Conn., much the same way he did in Newport, when he was a minister at that town’s First Congregational Church in 1909. The library in Enfield digitized the photographs and posted them on its website.
In viewing the Connecticut photographs, Perkins said it appears many subjects were affiliated in some way with the church in Enfield, but he remains uncertain if Yale took a similar approach in Newport.
Glass lantern slides were made in the same way as pictures on paper, Perkins said. The photographs were taken using an ordinary camera for that time. The negatives were then transferred onto glass as positive images using a chemical bath.
The lantern slide predates photography. When they were first made, in the 17th century, they consisted of hand-painted images on glass and became part of a magic lantern, which had a light source at its center. The invention of photography, in the mid-1800s, came to dominate the making of the slides.
To digitize Yale’s slides, which are roughly 4 inches square, Perkins said he placed them individually over an LED light source.
“I would use masking tape to block off excessive light, then take a digital image of the illuminated slide with the light coming up from the bottom,” he said.
The book is available for viewing at Richards Free Library.
McGuire said Yale preserved for the town a valuable and detailed look at its past. The old Eastman School House and a barn on Unity Road that was constructed using timbers from the town’s first meetinghouse at the corner of Pine and Elm are two examples of buildings that Yale photographed that have been gone for years.
“Those are two treasures. They were lost and now we have them back again,” McGuire said. “He captured things that no longer exist. People in North Newport are over the moon seeing some of these old houses.”
Patrick O’Grady can be reached at pogclmt@gmail.com.
