1893 Chicago

 

A key photograph in the history of the Watch Tower Society is that for the 1893 Chicago convention, the first real national convention the Bible Students held. Most readers here will be familiar with the picture below that was published in the 1914 Chicago City Temple brochure. It shows around 76 of the 360 delegates in a group photograph. You may need to click on it to see the picture in full.

It would be nice to have the clearest photograph possible to try and identify the different Bible Students who appeared in the picture.

Does anyone out there have a better copy that could be shared? To illustrate, below is a selective enlargement from the bottom right hand corner of the photograph. Again you may need to click on it to see it in full. However, I think most would agree that the definition is far better.

The story behind the above is that when I was in America as an international delegate in 2014 I visited a home that had a large card-backed photograph of this scene. Using a cheap camera I took a quick snapshot of just this small section. The “original” from which the snap was taken is now apparently buried under glass in an Assembly Hall display. My reason for just taking a selective extract was that all I wanted at the time was a good photograph of a young Ernest Henninges and his wife to be, Rose Ball. They are sitting together on the ground in the front on the right. As a bonus, in this selective enlargement you can see in the “middle row” towards the left of the picture, CTR sitting with his wife Maria. Their inclusion was accidental, but this adds another picture to the Russell family history.

It was only when back home, several thousand miles away, that I realised what a missed opportunity this had been.

So again, does anyone have a nice clear photograph that can improve on the complete group photograph as shown in this post?