Huntington man preserves Long Island's history
Photograhers Peter Dicke and Neil Scholl look over images from the Hal B. Fullerton collection, which they have been digitizing for about a year. (Oct. 19, 2011) Credit: Erin Geismar
Neil Scholl sat in the library at the Suffolk County Historical Society flipping through a stack of black-and-white photographs showing scenes he’s come to know well.
A scooter race on the Great South Bay. A cottage on the water in Huntington. Four people touring farmland in an old car -- in the front seat, President Theodore Roosevelt.
The photos were mostly taken before Scholl, 82, was born, but looking at them, he feels as though he could have been there.
For the past year, Scholl has been working diligently to digitize the society’s Hal B. Fullerton collection of glass-plate negatives.
“When I do the pictures, I feel like I’m time traveling,” he said.
Of the roughly 2,500 negatives the society owns, Scholl has digitized about half of them. Some of the finished prints are displayed at the society’s Riverhead museum as part of the exhibit “Favorite Places, Suffolk County,” which runs through Nov. 19.
To do the tedious work, Scholl, with the help of fellow photographer Peter Dicke, photographs the glass-plate negatives, then reverses the images and touches them up using Adobe Photoshop. The result is an everlasting digital collection of images, available to the public, that tell the story of Long Island.
Fullerton, who died in 1935, was considered a “Renaissance man” and was lauded for his work with the Long Island Rail Road. He was an advertising agent (before the job description existed) who earned the title of “special agent” for the railroad in its early years. In modern times, he’d be the publicist for all of Long Island; his job was to make the Island attractive to tourists so they would use the railroad to get there.
Fullerton went to great lengths -- setting up public relations stunts like Charles “Mile-a-Minute” Murphy, a professional cyclist who attempted to pedal at a speed of 60 mph to compete with the railroad’s fastest-moving train; creating two experimental farms to prove the land was fertile, which he managed to get President Roosevelt to visit.
He photographed everything from the late 1890s to the early 1900s -- a collection the Suffolk County Historical Society now treasures.
“It’s just such a wonderful visual archive for us to have,” said Kathy Curran, director of the historical society. “To know what was going on in so many areas of Suffolk County life - it’s all there.”
Through the process of going through Fullerton’s work, Scholl has become an unofficial expert, able to rattle off Fullerton's life and accomplishments as if he knew him.
Anne Nauman, the granddaughter of Fullerton and his wife, Edith, said she’s been amused and flattered at how enthusiastic Scholl is about the project. Nauman, who lives in Las Vegas, has published three books on her grandparents.
“The first time he called me, which wasn’t that long ago, a year ago,” she said, “he didn’t know anything about my grandfather. He’s talked to me a lot, and now he’s learning a lot about him.”
Scholl said his fascination partly comes from the talent he recognizes in Fullerton’s work. He was not considered an artist at the time. His work was not done in the popular style of fine art, and the idea of taking photographs of day-to-day life was considered too commercial to be appreciated as an art form.
But today, Scholl -- who has been a street and documentary photographer for more than 65 years and a professor at the New York Institute of Technology in Old Westbury -- said he recognizes the photos for their quality.
The prints that Scholl has made are so sharp that viewers can see exactly what Fullerton saw, down to details like the bark on trees, pebbles in the road, shingles on a roof or an expression on someone’s face.
He also appreciates Fullerton’s tact and innovation because his work was influential.
“Why would he take a picture of a road being paved? Why would he take pictures of a mud bath after the rain?” he said. “He was doing it to push the towns to pave the roads.”
And, Scholl says, he has found a number of parallels between his family and Fullerton’s.
Scholl and Edith Fullerton share the last name “Cornelius” in their family line; they both lived in Brooklyn and attended the Pratt Institute; they both later moved to Hollis, Queens.
Hal and Edith Fullerton lived for a time in Huntington, which is where Scholl lives.
Going through Fullerton’s collection, Scholl recognizes places that he has also photographed -- from what appears to be the exact same angle -- before ever having seen or even known about Fullerton and his photos.
Scholl is doing the work for the society as a volunteer. Curran said it would take thousands of dollars to pay someone to do it. Scholl has received a grant for the work from the Huntington Arts Council, and part of the collection will be displayed at Huntington's Heckscher Museum of Art in early 2013.
He said he feels like he is playing an important role in preserving the history of Long Island and that of a man who worked so hard to make it what it is today.
“We really would not have known what was happening on Long Island then if it weren’t for Fullerton,” he said.
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