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BABBITT, PLATT D. (1823–1879)
American photographer

Equal parts artist and entrepreneur, Platt Babbitt made
memorable photographs in a frontier region of young
America. For several years, he worked a commanding
vantage, selling to tourists daguerreotypes he made
of them as they experienced brink of Niagara Falls.
Information about Babbitt—and a good bit of his
legendary appeal—was infl uenced by accounts writ-
ten more than 30 years after the facts by John Werge,
a traveling photographer and teacher from Scotland,
who sold accoutrements for the early photographic
processes and later wrote about his exploits in a book
copiously entitled, The Evolution of Photography with
a Chronological Record of Discoveries, Inventions, Etc.,
Contributions to Photographic Literature and Personal
Reminiscences Extending over Forty Years. Werge may
have overstated Babbitt’s “monopoly” over photographs
of the Falls, where he was said to have taken daguerrean
exposures of visitors “without their knowledge,” but he
was fully accurate in identifying Babbitt as a “speciman
of American character.”
Born and raised in Lanesboro, Massachusetts in a
Berkshire farming family, Babbitt caught the national
impulse for westward migration, and followed the Mo-
hawk Trail toward the great Niagara, the giant cascade
that had captured the imagination of a young American
republic with its power and subliminity. The Erie Canal,
which paralleled the age-old byway of native people,
had opened in 1825, facilitating travel and tourism,
and Niagara Falls was a commanding destination. The
small village at the Falls became a far larger, as all sorts
of cash opportunities opened along the banks of the
Niagara. Vendors hawked access to special points of
view from which to consider the Falls, guidebooks, and
trinkets, including daguerreotype likenesses, displayed

in cases and in jewelry. Platt Babbitt’s name fi rst appear

in Niagara regional press advertisements in 1850, fi rst

on the Canadian side, in partnership with photographer

and concessionaire Saul Davis, who was known for

his aggressive sales tactics, and later, by 1853, on the

American side, sometimes in partnership with a store

owners, such as with Thomas Tugby, owner of Tugby’s

Mammoth Bazaar, located several hundred feet from the

location that Babbitt used to make his images.

By 1853, Babbitt had leased property to create a pa-

goda to hold his camera set up, established with a view

toward the lip of the American Falls. It was a dramatic

site, where visitors could feel the huge roar of the falls

and enjoy the gentle mist that fi lled the air. Babbitt set

up his daguerreotype apparatus such that it also allowed

exposure of scenic Goat Island, Terrapin Tower and the

Canadian Horseshoe Falls in the background, along with

the likeness of tourists in the near ground, standing on

the rocks at the edge of the river. Babbitt then is among

the fi rst to make a photograph to enhance a tourist’s

experience, and he is among the fi rst to work the taking

of photographs within the landscape.

The likelihood that tourists were unaware that Babbitt

was exposing a daguerreotype plate of them is remote,

however, given the prominence of Babbitt’s pagoda and

the advertising of his studio, located in the second fl oor

of the building that provided entrance to an incline car,

also at Prospect Point. The incline elevator permitted

passage down the precipice to the ferry at the base of

the falls. All of this attention should have attacted even

the most awe-fi lled visitor, who would unlikely maintain

the pose and stillness that Babbitt’s images evidence.

Indeed, Babbitt was an intrepid business man, using

every device to attract business, shifting into different

media as it was called for by the advances of the pe-

riod. He also was a skilled image-maker; his full plate

daguerreotypes (6½ × 8½ inches) are uniformly well