Jacob Ridgway Moore was a valued member of New York society for 25 years. He was an excellent dancer who was reported by the NY Times to have led more cotillions with the likes of Lady Astor and Mrs. Vanderbilt than anyone else in town. But in 1893 he admitted in a court of law to having an affair with another mans wife. This immediately made him a social pariah, not for having an affair, but for admitting to it in a court of law, thus totally destroying the young woman's reputation. For the next several years he mostly spent his time fishing the rivers and streams of the Pacific Coast and writing of his adventures in fishing magazines of the day. In 1897, on his way to see two new species of trout recently discovered in a lake in the Olympic Mountains, he purchased his first camera. This was something he had been thinking about doing for a while. He spent the next four years documenting his travels from the east coast to the west coast and from Canada to Florida until his death in September 1901

These are scans of cyanotype prints that have been converted to grayscale in Photoshop. The original photographs were taken by my great-great-great uncle, Jacob Ridgway Moore between the summer of 1897 and his death in September, 1901. The information that I have been able to uncover about the people and places that Ridgway photographed was only possible through the gracious help of more than 50 people, some by email, some by phone and some through information they published on the internet. I have corresponded with people from London to California and Canada to Florida. What I'm learning continues to evolve as new information becomes available. Thanks for taking the time to study this remarkable body of work.

When I began work on this project in June, 2002, I believed that these photos were all that remained of JR Moore's photography. I was told by family members that when Moore died in September of 1901, all of his photography effects were given to his nephew, Vincent Irick, who lived in Vincentown, NJ. The photos I now have were printed by Vincent in early 1902 and sent to Ridgway's father's home (Vincent's Grandfather) on the Eastern Shore of Virginia. That home remained in our family until my Grandfather's death in 1984. My sister rescued the cyanotypes at that time and gave them to me in 2002, with the hope that I could find out something about them.

It was believed by my family that when Vincent Irick died in 1949, his widow destroyed all the photography "junk" of her husband, including all the prints, negatives and journals of his uncle, JR Moore. But in May of 2006, someone living in Vincentown donated a large box of film and glass plate negatives to the Southampton Historical Society. These negatives had been given to her husband many years before by Hector Irick, Vincent's brother. Unbelievably, the box contained most of Ridgway Moore's negatives and many taken by his nephew Vincent.

Through inscriptions on the negative sleeves, it became clear that the photos I have, while mostly Moore’s, also include a number of Vincent’s (see the Vincentown gallery). Vincent selected, printed, numbered, and captioned his uncle’s photos using Moore’s journals as reference. This explains the many non-consecutive numbering errors and the occasional mis-captioned photos that are in this collection.

The file number assigned by Vincent appears below each photo. If he included a caption, it appears below the file number, but not in the thumbnail. Any editorial comments appear in parentheses.