Photograph album: Souvenir Floride

Item

Photograph album: Souvenir Floride

• 1907 (Creation)

"A unique assemblage of photographs documenting the visit of four French speculators to Florida in the first decade of the 20th century. Central Florida is home to the United States' largest known deposits of phosphate, which has been mined in the state since at least the 1880s for use in agricultural fertilizer and a variety of industrial and food-related applications. The present album documents a visit by a group of two men and two women (almost certainly from France) to a phosphate mining area of Polk County, just east of Tampa. The French were major investors and speculators in Florida phosphate throughout the industry's early decades. The phosphate industry has come under intense scrutiny in recent decades due to the environmental impact of its processes, which often result in red tide (toxic algae blooms) and the death of local wildlife.

The trip made by French citizens seen here evidently began with some drama, as the album opens with a series of ten images of a derailed locomotive and the efforts to get it back on track. The cleanup effort features several African American Pullman porters assisting with the digging. The remainder of the images are almost all related to the phosphate industry. The pictures depict the camp where the party stayed, with images of their large, well-built cabin, quarters for the African American workers, recently cleared forest, phosphate-rich ground, various prospectors, the Standard Phosphate Company processing plant and generator, and the railroad used to transport the phosphate to Lakeland. They then travel to neighboring deposits, camps, and factories, including the Greenbay Phosphate Co. (now a ghost town) and something labeled as 'Rockefeller [sic] Plant.' The latter is somewhat puzzling, since the Rockefellers were not known to be involved with the Florida phosphate industry, through their experience with refining natural resources may have led them to dabble in phosphate. One interesting image of a field that looks particularly stripped bare is captioned, 'Exploitation,' testifying to the environmental impact of phosphate mining on the land under which it is mined. The album ends with some additional images of the visitors in their cabin, a couple of images depicting visitors hunting, and finally, visiting Tampa. The images in Tampa include the public gardens, the courthouse, a port building on stilts, the shipyard cranes, and the docks where cargo ships were loaded with phosphate for export." --description from McBride Rare Books.