WHAT THE DETAILS REVEALED

摘要

As a historical record, the Fontayne-Porter daguerreotype is unparalleled. It contains the first photographic images of steamboats, a railroad station, and one of the country's earliest astronomical observatories. It may also be one of the earliest pictures to show free blacks, who were building a community in Cincinnati, just across the line from Kentucky slave country. A ditch running from the corner of a building down to the river-eroded by effluent from an outhouse-presages the cholera epidemic that hit the city the following year.