Highlights Archives
Remembering Madison: the Lloyd Jones Album
The Richard and Georgia Lloyd Jones family photo album captured life in Madison from July 1911 to August 1919. Richard, the editor and publisher of the Wisconsin State Journal at the time (as well as the cousin of famed architect Frank Lloyd Wright), was the primary photographer. He documented the city's rail lines and stations, homes, buildings and street scenes, as well as neighbors and relatives. The photographs in the Lloyd Jones' Madison Album are the subject of this month's image gallery from Wisconsin Historical Images, the Society's online image database.
Richard Lloyd Jones (1873-1963) was born in Janesville, Wisconsin, in 1873 but grew up in Chicago. He attended the University of Wisconsin from 1893 to 1894 and graduated from the Chicago Law School in 1897. After moving to New York, Lloyd Jones became editor of Cosmopolitan Magazine in 1902 and then a writer and associate editor for Collie's Weekly in 1903. Lloyd Jones married Georgia Hayden of Eau Claire, Wisconsin, on April 30, 1907.
In 1911, Lloyd Jones bought the Wisconsin State Journal from Amos P. Wilder and moved his family to Madison to become its editor and publisher. During their time in Madison, Richard and Georgia took photographs of their three children, their two homes (941 Harvey Terrace and the exterior and interior of 1010 Walker Court, now Rutledge Court, on the north shore of Lake Monona) as well as their neighbors, relatives and one prominent out-of-town visitor — Booker T. Washington when he lectured in Madison. They recorded family excursions in their automobile to the Henry Vilas Zoo, the University of Wisconsin campus, the State Fish Hatchery, Tenney Park, Brittingham Park on Monona Bay, the Yahara River and its chain of lakes, and possibly the first airplanes to land in Madison.
Lloyd Jones sold the Wisconsin State Journal to the Lee Newspaper Syndicate in 1919 and moved his family to Tulsa, Oklahoma, where he bought the Tulsa Democrat (later renamed the Tulsa Tribune). Passing by Janesville and Chicago on the way to Tulsa, Richard took photos along the way.
Sometime after settling in Tulsa, the Lloyd Jones family created the Madison Album containing 117 pages with one or more photos per page. Most of the photographs (5 inches by 3 inches or smaller) look like "snapshots" while those depicting the exteriors and interiors of the family's Madison homes appear to have been taken by a professional photographer. Captions in white ink — several of which are quoted with the photographs — probably were written when the album was compiled, and others, typed on white paper labels, were added later, possibly after a return visit to Madison by youngest son Jenkin, and Jenkin's daughter, Georgia Lloyd Jones Snoke. Following her father's death in 2006, Snoke donated the Madison Album to the Society.
Incidentally, while in Tulsa, Lloyd Jones' cousin, Frank Lloyd Wright, designed a house for the family. Completed in 1929, the house is known as Westhope.
To learn more about the Society's online image collections, subscribe to our monthly email newsletter. You'll never miss a featured gallery again!
:: Posted August 25, 2008
|
