The Nov-Dec 2012 issue of LensWork Magazine has a wonderful portfolio of images by Beate Sass that were made at the Tall Timbers Research Station. I encourage you to check out her project here:

https://beatesass.com/?page_id=250

Ms Sass' Tall Timbers project focuses on todays descendants of the share-croppers and tenant farmers who lived on the plantation at the time that Edward Beadel purchased the property in 1895. Her project also includes images from the Beadel's home and from the Jones Family tenant home which was recently restored to its 19th century appearance. At the time that JR Moore visited the farm, it was still know as Hickory Hill Plantation. The name was later changed to Tall Timbers Research Station.

As soon as I saw Ms Sass' portfolio in LensWork, I contacted her so I could share the images that Moore had made on the property, probably in 1901. These Moore images are located in the "Tallahassee and Hickory Hill Plantation Gallery". I've duplicated just the Hickory Hill images into this separate gallery.

I invite you to study the other images in the JR Moore collection. You will find that there are quite a few more photographs of black share-cropper and tenant farmers. Although Moore occasionally photographed the affluent, he saved the vast majority of his efforts for the lowest level of American society at the end of the Victorian era.

I don't know exactly why he focused so much of his attention there, but I can make an educated guess. Almost since its inception, photography has occasionally served as the conscious of society, whether by depicting the horrors of war, the deprecations of our planet, or the plight of those at the bottom of the social ladder.

In Ridgways case, he went through a cataclysmic, change in his social standing that may have been the impetus for this type of photography. Until 1893 he was considered one of the elite of New York and Philadelphia high society. He was a life-long bachelor, a clubman at the most exclusive clubs, an excellent cricket player, a nationally recognized authority on trout and trout fishing, and an exceptional dancer who was always in high demand to lead the cotillion at parties thrown by the likes of Mrs Vanderbilt and Mrs Astor.

But in 1893 he had an affair with another man's wife and was named a co-respondent in the divorce trial. Following his testimony he was shunned in the strongest sort of way by many of his former society friends for trashing the woman's reputation. He wandered the globe for a couple of years, but even then, gossip traveled quickly in the rarefied air of high society.

So in 1897 he bought a camera and joined the Camera Club of New York. He was soon having his prints selected for important juried shows in Philadelphia, Chicago, and London. Photographers were considered to be mostly a bunch of bohemians by his former "friends", but his new friends could not care less about his peccadilloes as long as he made excellent photographs. I believe he pointed his lens at the poorest in society as a way of showing that the gulf between the richest, where he had been, and the poorest in this country was way too wide. It's just a theory, but it makes sense to me.