Henry G. Peabody Photographs

Henry Greenwood Peabody was born in St. Louis, Missouri on April 27, 1855. He attended Washington University in St. Louis and the Pennsylvania Military Academy before graduating from Dartmouth College in 1876. Peabody studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for a year after graduation and worked briefly as an engineer for the Western Electric Company before settling in Chicago and establishing a studio with Alexander Hesler. In Chicago, Peabody met and married Dora Crocker Phelps (1859-1898). The couple relocated to Boston, where Peabody established a studio specializing in marine, architectural, and landscape photography in 1886. He also worked as the official photographer for the Great Northern Railway and the Boston and Maine Railroad in addition to travelling to Mexico as the photographer to the American Architectural Expedition of 1899. Peabody's photographs of Spanish-colonial architecture were later published as the plates to Sylvester Baxter's Spanish-colonial Architecture in Mexico.

In 1900, Peabody and his only daughter, Mildred Dora Peabody (1887-), moved to Pasadena, California, where Peabody worked as a travelling photographer for the Detroit Publishing Company and produced a number of east and west coast series, including a major body of photographs showing New Hampshire. Peabody left this position in 1908 and spent the remainder of his career producing photographs and slides of the American landscape for educational use. He also lectured on such subjects as the Grand Canyon and other national parks and eventually produced slide shows with synchronized audio lectures that he called talking films. Peabody died at his home in Glendora, California on March 25, 1951 at the age of 95.