Thayer County Historical Tidbits

My great-grandfather, Eli Smith, was the first photographer to set up shop in Hubble, which he did in 1889. (He also worked as a photographer for the same studio in Hebron whose "for adoption" picture is now on the Thayer County page.) He left a number of cases of old glass-plate negatives that were scenes of Thayer County in the 1880s and 1890s . . . wonderful pictures of Indians riding across the prairie with their hair blowing in the wind, railroad repair crews, Old Settler's Picnics, county fairs, etc. Then, during World War II, my grandmother went into a fit of housecleaning and sent the glass plates with my father and grandfather to use as clay pigeons while they honed their shooting skills just before hunting season began. Those idiots actually took them out to the lake and shot them into bits. It wasn't until years later that they realized just what they had done.

All that is left of my great-grandfather's work is an album of family pictures. Nice for us, but simply terrible for anyone else.

Submitted by Leslie Smith Collier