It’s easy to forget – at least for me – the proximity with which our current times coincide with one of the most monumental eras of our modern time. What I speak of is the era of the atomic weapon.

It was only 60 years ago that the doomsday machine was set into motion and Oppenheimer had managed to turn a desert experiment into a national source of pride (which ironically also became the very subject of national paranoia). With the atom, we had managed – if only for that brief moment before the Soviets had discovered the same route – to command primacy in the world stage, unfettered by jingoist competition.

An image by LIFE photographer Ralph Crane, from an unpublished assignment on ICBM missile sites in the 1960s.

But what really has me reeling is not the fact that I underappreciate its proximity to my own generation, but the fact that my own generation knows little or nothing about Nikita Khrushchev, Operation Crossroads, Nagasaki, or Hiroshima.

Today we take little note, yet the undercurrents of a post-atomic society are more relevant than they’ve ever been – they manifest themselves in color-coded threat levels, between the margins of network news, and within the very fabric of our modern think tanks. It’s a purely Hegelian wellspring that runs below the surface of American society, but in its seemingly diminuitive nature, it affects every aspect of our politics.

The satellite photo, taken by GeoEye, shows a nuclear enrichment facility at a military site about 20 miles north-northeast of Qum, and 100 miles southwest of Tehran, Iran.

The fact that Iran is about to have one doesn’t seem surprising any more. After all, North Korea is about to have another and it seems to be the modern day mark of Progress for any self-respecting nation. If not a deterrent, it surely is a bargaining chip.

What I saw tonight reopened my eyes to its true meaning. As a collection of ephemera, gathered together from various war department films, promotional spots, talk shows, and propaganda shorts, Atomic Cafe brings you into the mindset of the 1950s – a time when rapid expansion of the federal government led to Eisenhower’s sober warning about the military industrial complex (when a former general – a war-man – decries the unsustainable rise of a state-sponsered defense industry, well, one just has to listen). Isn’t Eisenhower the man who connected all of these atomic bases by a national highway system?

This film is true because it is unaltered and free from the commentary that taints most documentaries these days. It’s not very often that a film simply speaks for itself. Even the modern documentary is rife with shaky secondary sources and personal, impassioned, commentary from the filmmaker. Though Atomic Cafe has no qualms with establishing its strong stance, it’s a very believeable and naturally affinity-inducing stance.

As an explorer, I often find myself in the creations of that era. I did not live through that time. I have no recollection of what it must have felt like – or how my mind would have wrapped itself around the anima in the air. What I do have, as a humble explorer, are my experiences as an observer and analyzer who has catalogued dozens of these places (from the deepest of contaminated ICBM silos to the tallest industrial escalator). In the former, I had stood in front of the 40-foot-wide 150-foot-deep cylinder in awe of its size and demeanor of power; in the latter, I ascended the rusty escalator links to get a birds eye view of where ships contaminated by nuclear tests in the Bikini Atolls were dismantled.

Atomic Cafe reminds me of a project that has special meaning to me: The collection of dying archival materials – many of which are finding themselves vanishing in the midst of the sheer volume of their existence. And two individuals who have adopted this much-needed cause are Rick and Megan Prelinger. The two of them maintain the Prelinger Archives, a collection of ephemera that has recently taken the notice of the Library of Congress.

It didn’t take a nuclear standoff to destroy much our nation’s cultural heritage – much of it simply vanished because of neglect. For example, the Library of Congress says that only 1 in 10 films made before 1928 exist today. Thankfully, what is presented in Atomic Cafe tells us a little about one of the most influential milestones of the millenia. Where we go from here nobody knows. All we can do about these clippings from the past is talk about them, tell the truth, and make sure that these stories don’t die.

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Stone Opera House Stage Door: Where Ogarita Booth Henderson and her husband, Al, worked with the Floy Crowell troupe.

Editor’s Note: What follows is what will hopefully become a series of articles from Mr. J.T. Colfax, resident of Binghamton, New York.  In late 2006,  J.T. found an entrance to a tunnel in his backyard.  Since then, he has followed the path of the tunnel, from the top of Mt. Prospect, to the bowels of downtown Binghamton. The incredible stories tell about a place little-seen by Binghamton residents, but which includes a history of prohibition-era rum-running, mysterious deaths, and … as you will see in this article … the transplantation of an entire cemetery.  Think of this as an early Halloween treat. Enjoy.

Bubbling forth now is the story of two cemeteries. One, the Binghamton City Cemetery, obliterated by commerce over 100 years ago; the other, Glenwood Cemetery, with a history of neglect stretching equally as long. They were five miles apart, but in 1907, their stories joined together when 1,330 bodies were evicted from the City Cemetery and carted by a team of drays through the freezing winter streets of Binghamton to rest at Glenwood Cemetery.

Mixed within this grisly drama, we give a heavy spotlight to the story of Ogarita Booth Henderson, a resident of Glenwood Cemetery since 1892. Her story will be accorded and afforded the star power to out-shadow the stories of hallowed, forgotten, and neglected lands.

The cemetery stories will follow in more precision and in keeping with this site’s emphasis on LAND. She is an inmate in a beautiful hilltop cemetery on a low-key mountain named Prospect.

The Rita Booth material that follows will be short on words for this reason. There just isn’t enough good information available. Her story will be interpreted here in the merest of nutshells. You will be soon bombarded with photographic depictions of articles related to her death in Binghamton, and you will see that none of them allow you to fully settle in to an understanding of her claim to be the daughter of Lincoln’s “assassinator.”

For now, go into the digital world of factoid presentation. What follows, in a series of photographs of articles, probably constitutes the best collection online of items relating to her story — and that is a shame, for it is not through hyperbole that I make the claim “best collection”; rather, it is through endless hours of searching online, and on microfilm in the Binghamton Library that makes me aware that this collection is both MEAGER and the “best.” I fully hope that someone makes me eat the claim.

Descendants of Ogarita Booth Henderson can be found to this day online seeking more information to prove their point. One can find endless references to people possessing THIS or THAT, which proves some point, but although they have the ability to troll ancestry sites, they seem averse to using the internet to SHOW any documentation.

And, with that rap on the knuckles out of the way, let’s proceed to rove through her story in this photo-voluminous manner, in which you will interpret the story your own way. I point out one more time, though, that Rita Booth rests in Glenwood Cemetery, which received 1,330 bodies in a disruption from the “old” cemetery in 1907. The story of that follows her story, and it is, as Twain would say, “no slouch.”

Because Ogarita Booth Henderson’s story gurgles online in such a way as to truly be a waste of time at this point (Oct. ‘09), here is a lump sum nutshell of the story of Rita Booth.

Ogarita Booth Henderson claimed to be the product of a secret marriage between her mother and John Wilkes Booth. Below you will see death notices that include that claim, and also an article from 1885 which does not elaborate on its reason for existing, but includes a mention of her as John Wilkes Booth’s daughter.

Before the presentation of these materials it is expediant to provide a link to a wiki about the situation.

Click to Learn More

The above was not done out of sloth…but it provides the basic gist of her story and leaves us unencumbered to present the following unfiltered material, some of which probably contributed to that story.

Here is a small vault of information from its proper time:

A 1924 Binghamton Press article about Glenwood Cemetery’s history sums up her story like this:

“Mrs. Ogarita Henderson, daughter of John Wilkes Booth, assassinator of Abraham Lincoln was a pretty young actress when she visited Binghamton 35 years ago, while playing her first real character role with a show troupe. She suffered an attack of acute indigestion while here and died suddenly in the Crandall Hotel. She was hurriedly buried in Glenwood Cemetery and her show troupe moved on to the next stand. Her grave, marked only by a small pine tree has been almost forgotten.”

IN this way we can see that the three foot tombstone currently on her grave was not there for at least the first 32 years of her residency in Glenwood Cemetery. As for the remark that the acting troupe immediately moved on, I have found a notice in the April 6th, 1892  Binghamton Herald Republican that the troop actually extended their planned stay by one day, and at the discounted price of 10 cents per ticket. This extension appears in adverts and in a column mention.

Here is how the Binghamton Herald Republican presented the announcement of her April 12th 1892 death in their April 13th 1892 edition:

And here is how the New York Times presented it in their April 15th 1892 edition:

As for Ogarita Booth being shown to claim relation to John Wilkes Booth before her death, there is this, which is from seven years before her death in Binghamton. This is from the New York Times in 1885, and though the meaning of the thrust behind the article is not explained, this article does show that she was able to present herself without apparent question as the daughter of John Wilkes Booth to at least one New York Times reporter.

She was 26 years old at this time:

Below you will see an advertisement for the Floy Crowell troupe from April 5th 1892. Although Rita and her husband Al Henderson are not mentioned, they were among the 19 players in the production of revolving plays that promised, “NO DULL MOMENTS.”

And in every issue of the Binghamton Herald Republican during this period when the Floy Crowell troupe was in town, often only inches away from the show’s advert about their Opera House appearances, and including the issue that announced her death…there was also this advertisement for the cemetery that soon received her corpse. I have spent a lot of time on looking at Binghamton microfilm papers and I am not familiar with any other period in which the Glenwood Cemetery advertised so blatantly, expensively, or at all. The photo below is of an advert that was running daily during this period. This is shown at the end of the Rita Booth portion of this essay, but, those who intend to continue on to the coming information about the digging up of 1,330 bodies and their trek through town, should take note of the name HULBERT at the bottom of the advert. That is Hulbert SENIOR,..and we will meet his son at an elderly age when we take the bright lights off Miss Booth, and return to discussing both the missing and existing cemetery.

(Note: In the space of 24 hours hours we have received two new articles about Rita Booth.  Those and any subsquent materials will be added under the cemetery story below):

An article in the Binghamton Herald Republican (which is too obscured for photos) during the week of Rita’s troupe arrival in Binghamton details the Binghamton City Alderman attempting to pass legislation to abandon the City Cemetery and turn it into residential lots.

The City Cemetery was not only in disrepair, but was also in the way of progess. There were other graveyards, and all were cheaper than City Cemetery. But only Glenwood was taking out expensive advertisements at the time.

Eldredge street, where the "Old City Cemetery" was located.

The last sentence in Superintendant HULBERT’s advertisement for Glenwood Cemetery (above) is conspicous: “All orders for removing bodies will be promptly and carefully performed.” This is not in keeping with the usual mention of what undertaker took charge of a fresh body. Although it is in the realm of conjecture, this sentence is probably inserted into the advertisement to encourage those with means to transfer loved ones from that decaying cemetery with a threatened future to Glenwood Cemetery. Two of the most famous and prosperous families in town had already done so in previous decades (Whitney and Dickinson). Items up for discussion in town council meetings were often publicized well in advance…sometimes by bulletin board…and so it is assured by the large article (not shown), that it was well known the Binghamton City Cemetery was in a period of crisis; was probably not even accepting more burials; was under threat of condemnation; and was a long known place of disrepair. This was just plain “in the news” as Ogarita Booth Henderson, her husband Al, and the rest of the Floy Crowell troupe were in town.

Rita’s husband, Al Henderson, must be assumed to be the one to make the funeral decisions. All the early notices bear his name — and so do the articles about them signing together for various gigs. He would have probably seen the notices of the show, in the 4 days it was supposed to be in town, and also the suddenly added 5th day with a matinee and evening show. Some of these would have been interesting to him as a person involved in the show and how it was advertised. The advertisement for Glenwood Cemetery was always only a few inches away from any mention of the Floy Crowell show. If he and a non-ill Rita looked at the adverts as they arrived in town, they would have had within their vision adverts for Glenwood Cemetery, never knowing they would soon need the services of such. And if they followed the papers, they would also have seen the roots of the eventual abandonment of the City Cemetery, argued not for the first, nor the last time in print, but squarely in their time in Binghamton.

Lengthy articles can be found in Binghamton papers for a seventeen-year period showing much angst and controversy over the attempts to close the Old City Cemetery. Finally, on July 16th 1906, the council got their measure passed, and relatives or friends were told to have descendant bodies removed by December 1st. The city allowed the less-than-generous sum of ten dollars in expenses to families wishing to do this privately. Remaining bodies or bones would be removed to Glenwood Cemetery.

The enclosed photograph of an article about City Engineer Giles, and his task of staking out residential lots at the site is from January 1st 1907 (Binghamton Press).

Eight days later, F. B Hulbert, the supervisor of Glenwood Cemetery, and the son of the previous supervisor began the morbid task of moving 1,330 bodies across five densely populated miles — right through the business district.

Hulbert’s hired laborers had to cut through four feet of penetrating frost before the digging got easier. The remains were placed in pine boxes, and then stacked “with geometric precision” on carts drawn by a team of drays.

A January 29th, 1950 Press article depicts an elderly Mr. Hulbert standing over a collapsed tombstone recounting the story. The contract Mr. Hulbert signed with the City Of Binghamton stated that he was to be paid $8.50 per body. He was to remove the remains from the Old City Cemetery; place them in a three foot pine box; transport them to Glenwood; rebury them; and place a new marker if an old one didn’t exist.

Mr. Hulbert found that the Old City Cemetery had been “poorly administrated” [sic], and would end up seeing his work described the same way for decades. Records, “were missing and confused. Bodies were buried so indiscriminately that it became necessary to excavate almost the entire cemetery,” the Press reported. Later, when contractors began to build on the site, more bodies were found.

“Because of the inept method by which records were kept, hundreds of bodies were never identified,” the 1950 Press recounting says, “Graves were opened and bodies were found missing. Tombstones were found over empty graves.”

A city inspector named George A. Lincoln was assigned to oversee the exodus to Glenwood Cemetery. He kept a diary of the goings-on. His March 6th entry is peculiar:
“Partial body of adult. Remains were wrapped in a carpet and only about 18 inches below the surface. Reported to coroner and by him ordered to be interred as usual.” Mr. Hulbert recalled the incident 43 years later, remembering that a monkey wrench and a hatchet were found with the cut up body. Still, the coroner wanted this graveyard secret put back under the ground, albeit 5 miles away.

Eight days later, Mr. Lincoln wrote: “Body of adult–not identified (A clay pipe and rusty razor had been buried with this body.)”

Mr. Hulbert tells the story of finding 66 bodies in a common pit. These were determined to have been pulled from the Potter’s Field portion of the Old Cemetery years earlier to make way for Liberty Street to be built. For nearly two decades the City had been publicly debating the abandonment of the Cemetery, and yet, they had been quietly doing it all along.

Mr Hulbert told the Press that the City refused to pay the agreed upon $8.50 per corpse for these cases. He was finally instructed to place these remains three to a box, at the $8.50 rate. For the completed job, Mr. Hulbert was paid about $12,000 dollars.

Mr. Hulbert received many complaints for the state of Glenwood Cemetery. As part of his contract for the City Cemetery removals he was required to “set out in the corners of the lots trees and shrubs of value not less than $100.” Mr. Hulbert says this was done, but some of these plants were killed in a dry summer, and others were strangled by weeds.

“We’ve taken it standing up for many years,” Mr. Hulbert said of the complaints, “we don’t want to shirk any responsibility, but since the bodies were reburied the City of Binghamton never has paid a penny for their upkeep. For the price we received we hardly could be expected to maintain the plot.”

Mr. Hulbert, and many of his family members, including his father, who is probably the man who placed Ogarita Booth Henderson in her grave, are all buried on a steep ravine in Glenwood Cemetery. Their plots are a stones throw from her grave. Random pieces of tombstones can be seen dotting the ravine, some of them working their way into a brook, washing away into a storm drain.

(NOTE: Above are two articles sent in generously by Author Ron Franscell, “The Dark Night.” Click on the thumbnail to view the larger version).

The stage where Rita did her last performances.

Editors Note: Over time, newly found items about Ogarita Booth Henderson will be whispered in the comments below, where several updates already exist.

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As home to a burgeoning population of urban explorers, France has always been ahead of its time. In fact, the government sanctioned and sent photographers across the country in the mid-19th century on the taxpayer’s dime. The photographers’ goal was to explore and photograph the crumbling architecture and infrastructure of the country.

In 1851, the Commission de Monuments Historiques embarked on an unprecedented survey of the French landscape. Five photographers traveled to the far reaches of France. Their targets would be the buildings that made up the heritage of France – the “architectural patrimony” of the country. It was to be known as a Mission Heliographique, and the photographers returned with plates and prints portraying buildings – many of which no longer exist. Sadly, upon return, their negatives remained largely unpublished for over a century.

An image of a church entry by Hippolyte Bayard

Edouard Baldus (1813-1889), Hippolyte Bayard (1801-1887), Gustave Le Gray (1820-1884), Henri Le Secq (1818-1882), and Auguste Mestral were chosen to photograph France’s built heritage (you can download a detailed analysis of Le Secq’s 1851 photos here – 3MB PDF). The Societe Heliographique – with the financial support of the French government – had chosen these photographers as the nation’s sole documentarians of their crumbling and ‘archaic’ architecture. Each photographer was told to visit a specific region of France. Baldus went to the south and east; Le Gray embarked on a journey to the Chateaux of the Loire Valley-Blois, as well as numerous small towns with Romanesque religious edifices; Le Gray and Mestral traveled to the yet-to-be-restored town of Carcassonne and other sites in south-central and central France; Le Secq was dispatched to the north and east side of France, where he found towering Gothic cathedrals; and Bayard (the only stalwart user of glass negatives) went to Brittany and Normandy to document the quaint architecture of Coastal France.

Photos of (from left to right) Gustave Le Gray, Hippolyte Bayard, Henri Le Secq, and Auguste Mestral

The five photographers returned in the Winter of 1851 with more than 300 photographs. There was much fanfare upon their return. But the photos were immediately retrieved and locked in a drawer. Bayard’s glass negatives are yet to be found.

The Mission Heliographique was the first state-sponsored, photographic survey of architecture. Yet the visionary parent society, the Societe Heliographique, only survived for less than three years, from 1851-1853. Even Le Gray, one of the five ‘esteemed’ photographers on the expedition – found himself in Syria and Egypt in 1860, on the run from tenacious creditors. Le Gray later died in Cairo, perhaps still incognito due to his debts.

The ruins of Karnak, by Gustave Le Gray, while he was exiled in Egypt.

The expedition’s failure as an artistic polemic to save architecture was perhaps – ironically – due to its success. According to Naomi Rosenblum, in “Documentation: Landscape and Architecture,” The photographers’ skill and artistry helped doom the project. The beautifully composed images of decaying buildings made them appear in a positive light, which did little to encourage the restoration work for which the Mission Heliographique had originally embarked. It was said that – soon after the Mission Heliographique – Paris lost 70% of its architecture due to the urban renewal efforts of Napoleon III under the architectural supervision of Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann.

A Church in France by Hippolyte Bayard.

Ironically, Napoleon saw the great potential of the new medium of photography and of the Mission Heliographique, in particular. Says Naomi Rosenblum, in A World History of Photography, “The [French] government continued to regard photography as a tool integral to its expansive domestic and foreign programs, commissioning documentations of the countryside, the railroad lines, and of natural disasters as evidence of its concern for national programs and problems.”

Napoleon III used photography to propagandize to the French population and monumentalize the new architecture he had created under his rulership. Within a decade of the Mission Heliographique, Charles Marville was hired by the City of Paris to document the Medieval passageways soon-to-be demolished by the wrecking ball of Haussman’s grand vision. One might assume that Marville incited a preservation consciousness through his photos of decaying architecture, but the fact was that Marville often purposely portrayed his subjects in a negative light – often using these photos to legitimize the Urban Renewal efforts of Baron Haussmann (and, by default, Louis Napoleon as well). One particular example is the photo below, in which Marville sprayed the streets with water prior to photographing the alleyway (in order to make the street appear infested with sewer).

A potrait of Charles Marville (left), and one of the famed works of Marville, which was intentionally "made-up" to appear as if the alleyway was infested and inundated with sewer.

One might say that the efforts of Baldus, Bayard, Le Gray, Le Secq, and Mestral were all to no avail. With their photos locked in a drawer, and a number of the buildings they photographed demolished under Napoleon III – some might see the Mission Heliographique as an exercise in futility – a project that did not carry through on its intended goal.

I’d like to see it in another light.

The days of the Commission de Monuments Historiques no longer exist. State-sponsored surveys of historic buildings are essentially a thing of the past. Though the United States instituted its own version as a result of the New Deal, known as the Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS) — the skimpy funding (HABS relies largely on summer interns these days) and the lack of a grand vision of documentation both ensure that HABS fails to encapsulate the artistic inspiration that the Mission Heliographique had.

In the end — ironically — what had once seemed to be an utter failure became an astounding success 100 years later. Gustave Le Gray had posthumously achieved the brass ring of photographic prowess: One of his photographs was among the list of top ten most expensive photographs sold in history when it was auctioned at the price of $838,000 in 1999.

Gustave Le Gray's "The Great Wave," recently sold for $830,000, and was listed as one of the top ten most expensive photographs of all time.

I’d like to think of modern urban explorers as the “illegitimate” Le Grays and Le Secq’s of our time. Many of us skirt the law to beat the wrecking ball. I’m sure many of us hope that, some day, our work will be valued and understood in the same way that these photographs are today.

Further Research about the Mission Heliographique

All About the Mission Heliographique

• http://www.metmuseum.org/TOAH/hd/heli/hd_heli.htm
• http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m3575/is_1263_211/ai_86390754/

Napoleon’s Use of Photography as Architectural Propoganda

• http://www.archdaily.com/15271/learning-from-the-slums-12literature-and-urban-renewal/
• http://livgudmundson.com/essay/essay-napoleon.html
• http://www.findingfrance.com/stories/baron_hauss.html

More about HABS/HAER

• http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/collections/habs_haer/
• http://crmjournal.cr.nps.gov/04_article_sub.cfm?issue=Volume%201%20Number%201%20Fall%202003&page=6&seq=1

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