(PHOTOGRAPHY) Photograph of mentally disabled laborer Jerry

Sale 2663 - Lot 337

Price Realized: $ 406

?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price

Estimate: $ 600 - $ 900

(PHOTOGRAPHY.) Photograph of mentally disabled laborer Jerry Plowden. Albumen photograph, 7½ x 4¼ inches, on original photographer's mount, with long pencil caption on verso; repaired 4-inch tear, other moderate wear. Bedford, PA: C.E. Howard, photographer, circa 1889-1894

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A photograph of a man on the margins who seemed to leave an impact on those around him. Census and newspaper records suggest that he was not only illiterate but unable to speak, and that he was cared for by his washerwoman sister.

The caption on verso reads: "Jerry Plowden. In rags, yet always happy and a sweet singer. Would not attend his own church, but was faithful in attendance at the Bedford Reformed Church. Always occupying the same last seat back against the wall." The photographer C.E. Howard was active in Bedford, PA from at least 1889 to 1894.

Jeremiah Plowden (circa 1830-1904) was born in Virginia, and listed in the 1870 census in Bedford, southwestern Pennsylvania. He was described as a day laborer, illiterate and "idiotic," apparently living with his sister Eliza and her two young sons. By 1880, Eliza had moved a few miles south down the turnpike to Cumberland, MD, where she worked as a washerwoman, but Jerry's whereabouts are unknown. He appears again in the 1900 census as J. Plowding, an illiterate day laborer listed as unable to speak English, again with his sister Eliza Murdock, on North Mechanic Street in Cumberland, MD. His hospitalization as a "former citizen of Bedford" was reported in the Cumberland Times and the Bedford Gazette of 7 October 1904: "Jerry Plowden, an aged colored man well known to many residents of Cumberland . . . went into the blacksmith shop on North Mechanic Street today, while the workmen were at dinner, sat down and fell asleep. As he was well known to them, thoroughly honest and reliable, they paid no attention to him after their return and let him rest." Efforts to rouse him were unsuccessful and, still unconscious, he was "removed to his home on West Green Street."