Faces of the Valley: Long-lost photos bring family history to life for Buffalo Township woman

Charles and Catherine Waggoner were quite the amateur photographers on their homestead in rural Ohio, capturing not only the stiffly posed portraits typical of early 1900s, but somewhat candid moments, too.

Using a wooden, boxy Kodak camera that took cartridges about the size of a postcard, the couple produced dozens of glass negatives of their relatives on the family farm in Findlay. For decades, they collected dust at the farmhouse built by family patriarch and Charles’ grandfather, William Waggoner.

If it wasn’t for Jeanne Bender of Buffalo Township, these artifacts of country life at the turn of the 20th century would be lost.

“I think I’d describe my Grandfather Charles as a techno junkie of 1906,” Bender, 78, said as she stood next to a selection of these photos assembled with help from the New Kensington Camera Club.

The exhibit can be seen at the Focus on the Arts Gallery in the Pittsburgh Mills Mall. It shows pictures from about 1906 to 1916 as well as the antique camera. The gallery is open from 5 to 8 p.m. Fridays and noon to 5 p.m. Saturdays. This weekend, however, is the last chance to catch the exhibit, as it runs only through August, when the club’s lease ends.

Focus on the Arts could reopen later this year at a location yet to be announced.

Bender, whose maiden name is Waggoner, lived on the family farm until getting married in 1968. Her husband, John, was drafted into the Air Force during the Vietnam War as a precision photo processor, deciphering aerial shots behind enemy lines.

The original farmhouse was torn down in the late 1990s, but the land has remained in the family. Bender owns half of the 40-acre plot and leases it to farmers.

As a teenager, Bender would toy around with the old Kodak, but it would be decades until she discovered the 67 negatives that accompanied it. Then, in January, she met Tom Bista, a founding member of the camera club, who put her in touch with its first president, Donald Henderson.

Henderson, a vintage photography enthusiast, got to work digitizing each negative. Most of the 25 picked out by Bender for the exhibit are remarkably clear, but none of them are retouched. For Henderson, it was a jackpot.

“So much of this stuff gets tossed,” he said. “People don’t realize what they have.”

Each contains a slice of life from a time long since past, bringing Bender closer than ever to her family’s history.

One photo shows Bender’s aunt, Ruth Waggoner, as a small child. She is sitting in a wicker chair wearing a dark, puffy dress and staring seriously into the lens. Another shows Ruth Waggoner’s mother, Catherine, sitting at a piano that Bender now owns and her son took lessons on.

“I feel like I’ve been immersed back in the 20th century with some of these pictures,” Bender said.

Not every photo is perfect. Several of them have white spots caused by a light leak during the capture or development process, reflecting the challenges faced by early photographers.

There are a few subjects that, despite her research and use of a family record book, she hasn’t been able to identify. But for the most part, this has been an exercise in getting to know her family better, including the people behind the bulky, awkward camera that once passed as state of the art.

Bender hardly met her grandparents. Charles Waggoner died in 1943 and Catherine Waggoner died in 1947, one year after Bender was born.

“It’s sort of like I really know them now,” Bender said.