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    Fort Collins:: The Miller Photographs
    Fort Collins:: The Miller Photographs
    Fort Collins:: The Miller Photographs
    Ebook201 pages1 hour

    Fort Collins:: The Miller Photographs

    By Barbara Fleming and Malcolm McNeill

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    About this ebook

    Photographer Mark Miller opened his studio in Fort Collins, Colorado, in 1914. The town he chose to live and work in sits in a river valley in northern Colorado, nestled between the Rocky Mountain foothills and the semiarid high plains, with Denver to the south and Cheyenne, Wyoming, to the north. Established as a Civil War-era army post, the town was a Wild West frontier outpost until it was tamed in the 1870s by the arrival of a land-grant college and the railroad. By the turn of the century, Fort Collins had become a quietly respectable college town with a thriving economy and steadily increasing population. Over almost six decades, as the small town evolved into a city, Miller photographed people, businesses, and landscapes. Fort Collins: The Miller Photographs offers a representative sampling of the over 70,000 Miller images, a collection housed at the Fort Collins Museum's Local History Archive.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArcadia Publishing
    Release dateSep 18, 2012
    ISBN9781439623145
    Fort Collins:: The Miller Photographs
    Author

    Barbara Fleming

    Barbara Fleming, a native of Fort Collins, Colorado, writes a weekly column on local history for the Fort Collins Coloradoan newspaper. She has always loved history, an interest she's been able to indulge after retirement. She is the author and coauthor of several local history books for Arcadia Publishing and one previous book for The History Press, along with a historical novel, Journeying, and a Donning Company publication, Fort Collins: A Pictorial History. She lives in Old Town Fort Collins with her cat, Shadow.

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      Book preview

      Fort Collins: - Barbara Fleming

      inquiries.

      INTRODUCTION

      Mark Miller’s lifelong love affair with photography, with his adopted town of Fort Collins, and with nearby Poudre Canyon created a legacy of more than 70,000 images. From the time he began to work as a photographic apprentice to Claude Patrick in 1910, to when he opened his Fort Collins studio in 1914, to the end of his life decades later, he chronicled the people, places, and events of this evolving high-plains town with his cameras. While most of his photography was commercial, he also captured special family moments and breathtaking canyon landscapes on film.

      Fort Collins: The Miller Photographs brings readers some of the best of Mark Miller’s images. The photographs in this book offer samplings of the commercial and personal pictures Miller took during his working life; collectively, they stitch together a patchwork quilt of the past, the time during which this gifted photographer lived and worked.

      We begin with a brief look at Mark Miller’s life using some of his family photographs. Not only do these photographs illustrate Miller’s life, but they also offer a glimpse of small-town family life in the early part of the last century. All four Miller children were involved in the business in some way, and Miller’s wife, Effie, an artist in her own right, often hand-tinted his studio portraits to give them a special touch. Perhaps the Miller Studio might have been called the Miller Family Studio.

      When the young couple set up shop in Fort Collins, the population was around 8,000. By the time Miller died, it had grown almost six-fold. Miller’s photographs reflect many of the changes the college town went through over five decades. In the years of the 19th century, agriculture was the mainstay of the town, which had begun life during the Civil War as a small military post. The land grant agricultural college was a natural outgrowth of the area’s economy, which was focused on crops such as wheat, corn, beans, and oats and sheep and cattle ranching. It welcomed its first students in 1879. By the dawn of the 20th century, the faculty and the student body were growing quickly.

      Gradually, as more settlers came to the area, farming and ranching gave way to other industries and interests. The college expanded its mission, broadening curricula in the humanities and sciences, and becoming a premier research institution, as well as fostering a nationally recognized school of veterinary medicine. After World War II, veterans came to town by the hundreds, attending college on the GI Bill. Many stayed; their presence influenced both the college and the town. By the 1950s, Colorado State College of Agricultural and Mechanic Arts had become Colorado State University. (Since the college’s name changed several times during the period this book covers, in the text it is referred to as simply the college.) Today Fort Collins is a city of about 130,000 residents, still a college town but no longer a cow town, and the university enrolls more than 25,000 students each year.

      But not everything changed. Despite numerous upgrades and alterations, downtown Fort Collins appears much the same as it did when Miller first arrived. Some of the buildings are gone; all have different tenants, but its unique character has been preserved. Encompassing Old Town Square, a stretch of College Avenue and a few side streets, the downtown was used as a model for a similar structure in Disneyland.

      Miller had a special love for nearby Poudre Canyon, where Fort Collins residents went to hike, fish, and camp. He took many photographs of the landscape—when the light was right—and the colorful resorts that dotted the canyon. With his family, he often made summer excursions up the canyon, placing his real-photo postcards in the resorts and collecting his profit (2¢) for every one that sold.

      Miller bought a working studio. Some of the early photographs in the negative files may have been taken by Miller’s predecessors. Some of the later photographs may have been taken by his youngest son, John Miller, who also became a photographer. Unfortunately, no record was kept of the specific photographer, and we are forced to treat them all as Mark D. Miller’s photographs. A few photographs used in the book were not taken by Miller. They are marked accordingly.

      The first half of the 20th century was, for many Americans, a time when families were close-knit, like Miller’s, when mom-and-pop businesses thrived, when pleasures were homespun and inexpensive. Mark Miller’s photographs evoke that idyllic time in the enduring images of the town he embraced as his own, the canyon where Fort Collins played, and his much-loved family. We invite you to come with us to Fort Collins, Colorado, between 1910 and 1970, through the lens of Mark D. Miller.

      In the early 1950s, Mark Miller (left) made this portrait of himself and his son John, who worked with him in Fort Collins for a time. In 1955, following in his father’s footsteps, John opened his own photography studio in New Holland, Pennsylvania. Mark Miller made most of the photographs used in this book, and John Miller provided technical insights on his father’s craft. (FCM.)

      One

      MEET MARK MILLER

      Mark Miller was 13 when his parents, Amos and Mary Miller, moved to Fort Collins in 1905. Amos, an investor and farmer, may have chosen the high-plains town because of his wife’s asthma. Whatever the reason, the decision was life-changing for Mark.

      Mary Miller waited in Denver with Mark, his older sister, Emma, and his younger sister, Geneva, while Amos sought a location for a hardware store—at least, that’s how the family story went, though accounts differ as to whether Amos opened a store. He had been in the hardware business in Scranton, Kansas, where the family hailed from originally.

      For a short time, the family lived in Ault, east of Fort Collins, before making the permanent move to Fort Collins. The small Western town they chose for their new home was neatly laid out with wide streets, abundant trees, and many large, sturdy houses. The Miller family had their choice among many churches. In the late

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