ExclusiveNathaniel Currier: The Pioneer of Illustrated News

Welcome to American Legends. My name is Tiffany Brannon. Each culture has its legends, and that could be myths or different stories, but here in America, our greatest legends are the wonderful heroes who are right from our history pages. Now, some of these heroes are very famous, and some are obscure. But each person deserves to be discovered, because each man or woman stands as a great example of how we can be better Americans in our daily lives. When you look at a newspaper, it's the flashy cover photo which catches your eye and makes you want to learn more. Can you imagine any newspaper, journal, magazine, or even headline online which doesn't have some kind of a cover photo? Believe it or not, before the 1840s, there were no pictures of any kind to illustrate the news. No colour photos, black and white photos, news sketches, cartoons, or anything else. All that changed because of one remarkable man. Born a poor boy who had to support his family by going to work at a young age, this man ended up building the printing business, which would bring not only news illustrations, but Americana prints to the whole world. This remarkable man was Nathaniel Currier. Nathaniel Currier was born in Roxbury, Massachusetts on March 27th, 1813. His parents were distant cousins, and they lived a very simple but comfortable life. He was the second of four children. However, when Nathaniel was only eight years old, his father died very suddenly, leaving the family without much means of support. Thus, young Nathaniel and his 11-year-old brother, Lorenzo, had to go to work to provide for their mother as well as their younger brother and sister. For the next few years, Nathaniel worked a series of odd jobs. When he was 15, he began what would become his life's work. He was apprenticed to a lithographer. This print business was the Pendleton Lithographic Shop in Boston, run by brothers William S. and John B. Pendleton. This was the first lithographic house in America. Now, what is lithography? Once a common form of printing, it was actually quite new at the time. This unique process of printing was developed in 1796 in Bavaria. It was developed by a Bavarian actor and playwright named Alois Senefelder. He taught it to a Frenchman named Dubois, who was the main printer at the Pendleton shop, and who taught it to young Currier. The Currier and Ives Foundation history page describes the process of lithography as follows. Lithography involves grinding a piece of limestone flat and smooth, then drawing in mirror image on the stone with a special grease pencil. After the image is completed, the stone is etched with the solution of aqua fortis, leaving the greased areas in slight relief. Water is then used to wet the stone, and greased ink is rolled onto the raised areas. Since grease and water do not mix, the greased ink is repelled by the moisture on the stone, and clings to the original grease pencil lines. The stone is then placed in a press and used as a printing block to impart black on white images to paper. Hearing about this, it might sound extremely antiquated, and like something that went extinct a long time ago. Nevertheless, the process of lithography was the beginning of certain printing processes which are still in use today, such as the printing of certain photographs and other embossed images. While most of them are more automated now, and would become so in the early 20th century, this process is still used on occasion for very specialized types of printing jobs that need to be done in high definition. And they can only be done by hand printing press, just as it was done in the old days by companies like Pendleton and Pendleton. Now, when he was 20 years old, Currier had finished his apprenticeship, so he went to Philadelphia, where he began doing a contract printing with M.E.D. Brown. Brown was a noted engraver and printer, and he hired the talented young Currier for the specialized job of making scientific images to print on lithographic stones for the American Journal of Arts and Sciences. This job took about a year, and it paid well. After this job had finished, Currier moved to New York City to begin working with John Pendleton, his former employer, at his shop there. Now, he worked with him for a little while, and the plan soon became for them to go into business together. They were going to have a joint venture. But Pendleton decided that he didn't like the New York City atmosphere as much, so he wanted to move back to Boston. Thus, Currier decided to buy the business. Now, as a very young man, just 21 by this point, he couldn't afford to buy the business by himself. But he went into it with another printer who had previously been in the music printing business as well as the piano making business. This man's name was Adam Stoddart, and although he originally came from England, he had been printing with a few different partners in New York City. They bought the business, and in 1834, it became Stoddart & Currier. It didn't last long, though. Currier and Stoddart didn't get along very well, and Stoddart quickly became very dissatisfied with the meager earnings of the company. Thus, he dissolved the partnership and left the business, taking his financial investment with him. This left the 22-year-old Currier on his own in 1835 to set up a solo shop in temporary quarters, which he called N. Currier Lithographer. He had little more than his lithographic stones and a dream at this point, but he was determined to make a go of his business. He continued doing odd printing jobs, but it was in the year 1835 that he began what would become the most notable thing for his business in the next few years and a very big deal for American news in general. You see, instead of just printing sheet music, which was one of the main things for which lithography had been used up to that point, Currier decided to start doing odd jobs, including making an occasional sketch of a current news event, which were often called disaster scenes or disaster pictures. It's believed that the first one he did was about the collapse of a hotel in New Orleans. It was called Ruins of the Planters Hotel, New Orleans, which fell at 2 o'clock on the morning of May 15, 1835, burying 50 persons, 40 of whom escaped with their lives. This really was more of a description than just a title. Yet, this simple sketch, which was done in black and white, was a way for people who were hundreds or thousands of miles away from New Orleans to get an idea of what it might have looked like. He made these prints and put them out in front of his shop, and before long, they were all sold out. The success of this print made an impression on young Currier, so he began making more of such prints, such as, at the end of that year, he made a similar sketch about a fire that had swept through the business district of New York, the Merchant's House, which is kind of like the Stock Exchange now. This was even closer to home, and people were even more curious about it because it was local news. So, Currier began to think about these things and started to turn the business into a more assorted type of job. Yes, he still would do the sheet music, or people would hire him for things, but he began gearing it more toward regular news events. It's interesting if you think about these sketches, or engravings, or prints, whatever you want to call them, and that people would buy them, just a picture of some incident that had occurred. If you think about it in a modern setting, you might think, well, I would never buy a photograph of some news disaster that's happened. But if you really think about it, whenever you click on that photograph that's the clickbait online, you've bought it. Whenever you open up that newspaper because the headline and photo caught your attention, you've bought that. You're buying these images with your time and attention, and oftentimes with your clicks or your subscription. And by the same token, there was really no other way to get the news in 1835, long before the advent of radio, and there wasn't as much competition for the news. A big city would probably have at most five different newspapers or journals, yet none of them offered any photograph to go along with these words. And the rates of literacy were not as high at that point in the developed city. So a lot of people may have heard random things, but it's hard to picture it if you can't paint that image in your mind through reading the in-depth article. Thus, to see something in an image like that, especially if it was a story that had some relevance to you, would be very valuable. Within the next few years, some bigger organizations began to see the value of such prints. For instance, the New York Sun. The Sun was impressed with the popularity of Courier's prints. So they decided, why let this business get away from us? If you can't beat them, join them. If you can't kill them, acquire them. So they decided to acquire Mr. Courier's talents. Courier's big break in 1840 was the print Awful Conflagration of the Steamboat Lexington in Long Island Sound on Monday evening, January 18th, 1840, by which melancholy occurrence over 100 persons perished. Clearly, this was a huge tragedy, as over 100 people died in this boating accident. Now, there's some debate over exactly what this print was. Some sources say that this was the print which was so popular it caught the attention of the New York Sun, whereas others say this was the first one that the New York Sun reproduced, or printed in their own publication. Either way, it was the beginning of big things for Mr. Courier. And beginning in 1840, the New York Sun printed an extra page in every weekly edition called The Extra Sun, and it was dedicated just to a one-page print of some lithographic print he'd made about whatever the top news story was that week. The Extra Sun is accepted as the first newspaper to feature any kind of illustration, whether by photograph or artistic rendering. Now, by the late 1830s, photography was in its earliest stages of development, but it was such a time-consuming and costly process that it would be a long time before newspapers would be able to render any kind of photographs in print. Lithography, on the other hand, was an affordable and doable means, something that they could accurately reproduce. It wasn't easy, though, to meet with the high demand. Nathaniel Courier, who was often known as Nat, had to have his staff working night and day to grind out those prints. Meanwhile, the 1840s, while a time of business growth for Courier, were also a time of great personal joys and tragedies for him in his life. In 1840, he married a woman named Eliza, and the next year they had a son whom they named Edward. In the year 1843, they had a daughter. She was named after her mother. Tragically, she died when she was very young, and four months later, her mother died as well, whether from grief or perhaps some kind of childbed fever. This left Nathaniel very melancholy and increasingly withdrawn. He was always noted as being a rather melancholy person, just sort of a tall, thin, and very quiet and thoughtful man. Not surprisingly, considering his background, having lost his father at such a young age, and having to be really one of the men of the house when he was just an eight-year-old boy, so it's no wonder that he had such a serious nature. He became increasingly more so during this time, and that personal tragedy reflected itself in his artwork as he began making more memorial or sentimental prints, which would be images commemorating deceased, oftentimes featuring images of people in a graveyard or by a tombstone, and the tombstones would often be unmarked so that people could fill in their own names as a personal memorial. However, things did look up for him in 1847, when he married for a second time. He married a woman named Laura Ormsby, who was a family friend, and she had a very self-reliant, strong nature. She proved to be an excellent helpmate for the grieving widow and a good mother for his then six-year-old son. Two years later, they had a child of their own, another son, but he died when he was a year old as well. So Edward was the only child whom Nathaniel had who lived to adulthood. During this time, as Nathaniel was often grieving, friends would frequently drop in to try to cheer him up, and Laura began the practice of always having an extra place set at the table in case some friends would drop in, and she ended up doing this for the rest of their lives, always keeping that extra place open in case some friend would want to drop in. The 1850s, however, would bring some new and different things to Nathaniel, particularly in the development of his business. And this was all through a man who would become one of the greatest forces of expansion in his business as well as his closest personal friend. This man was James Ives, and he would bring the business into what it is now best known as being the sentimental, patriotic, and homespun prince for which Currier and Ives would become famous. However, you'll have to wait to find out more about that when we talk about James Ives himself. Nathaniel Currier was an excellent businessman as well as a very creative, innovative person. It ran in his family, and he ended up employing both his brothers at his lithography throughout his career. Lorenzo worked for him on and off, and his younger brother, Charles, also worked for the company. Nathaniel taught him himself when he was 21 how to use the lithographic press, and Charles would work on and off for him and also develop his own things. For instance, Charles Currier developed a lithographic crayon which he would patent under the name Crayola. He also used his cousin's printing presses in the building, so it truly became a family business. However, like so many great men and developers of things, he needed someone who was totally different than himself to help him reach his greatest potential. Want to find out more about Currier and his eventual business partner, Ives? Join us next time for more American Legends.