Home Elijah Yeoman photographs
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Elijah Yeoman (1849-1930) was born at Arkleside in Coverdale. In the 1870s he became involved in a photographic business in Barnard Castle in County Durham, where his output was of exceptionally high quality. Around three and a half thousand Yeoman prints are now in the hands of the Bowes Museum, County Durham, having been given by the University of York, who had in turn obtained them from a clergyman, who is thought to have purchased the "counter albums" when Yeoman's business closed down. |
I first came across the name Yeoman during one of my regular Google searches of all "Harberton" links. This brought up an online exhibition [in 2008] of 137 of Yeoman's prints, organised by a gentleman called Parkin Raine, who was putting all of Yeoman's prints at the museum onto computer. Luckily for our Harberton website, this online exhibition included two pictures of Harberton: West Lodge at Tristford, and Simmons Farm:
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It is not known exactly when these pictures were taken, but in 1880 Elijah Yeoman married Honor Varder in Harberton, she being one of the sisters of Mary Varder who had married Thomas Bridges in 1869 in Harberton before they left to ultimately found Estancia Harberton in Tierra del Fuego. In the online exhibition at (www.thebowesmuseum.org.uk) the picture of Simmons Farm is titled "The Old House, Harberton" which would seem to be a fairly strong indication that the Simmons Farm shown was the Varder family home (rather than the older Symon(d)s Farm nearby.
It is probable that Yeoman also took the Bridges family photographs which appear in Lucas Bridges' book "Uttermost Part Of The Earth".
Click here to view several other photographs Yeoman took around Harberton.
My thanks to Parkin Raine and staff at the Bowes Museum for their invaluable assistance.