Oldest Known Photograph of Sebago Lake

By Douglas Watts

The other day, while doing historic photographic research for a regulatory filing for Friends of Sebago Lake, I came across this photograph on EBay and purchased it for $25. It is Sebago Lake circa 1870 from a nice gentleman named Ken Burkhardt of Albany, New York. This is a stereo-opticon photo. Above is the right-side image on the mount. Click on the photo to bring it up to full size. This is the full stereo mount it is taken from:



For those unfamiliar, stereo-opticon photographs were very popular in the 1870s-1880s and were made to be viewed through a special viewer that functions as binoculars. The camera used to take the stereo photos contains two separate lenses which produce two prints with a separation distance corresponding to the distance between your left and right eyes. By looking at the two images through the viewer, the two images merge into one, creating a strong 3D effect. Below is a typical 1870s-1880s stereo-opticon viewer:



The plastic GAF "viewmaster" viewers popular with children in the 1960s and 1970s employed the same trick of perspective to make images look "3D." Stereo photos are still used for aerial land surveying because the increased perspective allows elevation changes to be easily seen and quantitatively estimated. Because this photograph is in stereo-opticon format its date can be reliably fixed to the 1870s-1880s era. Judging by the view, it appears the photo was taken at one of the big beaches on Sebago: Long Beach in East Sebago or perhaps at Songo Beach in Casco.

What "jumps out" (pardon the stereo pun) about this photo is the enormous expanse of level sand. The sand is so high that the waves are breaking 100 feet offshore from the photographer's position. The bed of coarse stone at the bottom of the photo suggests the photographer was standing at the top of the "swash" zone of the lake, ie. close to the natural high water mark.

This photograph indicates that there must be more images out there from this period and probably this photographer, who is not identified in the mount. The back of the mount reads in faded, fancy quill pen, "Sebago Lake, Me."

Finding more photos of Sebago Lake from this era would be ... umm .... very useful.