By Charlie at Pasty Central (Chopper) on Sunday, August 26, 2012 - 08:47 am:
Over the next couple of weeks we will be exploring the life of J.T. Reeder (whose photos we have featured this summer) courtesy of J,T.'s great grandson, Michael Cooper. This article appeared in the Detroit News back in 1928:
ORCHID HUNTER GLORIES IN OUR NORTHLAND
By Russell Gore (Staff Correspondent, The Detroit News)
[published in The Detroit News, Sunday Sept. 9, 1928]
Houghton, Mich. – If the surpassing beauty of the Copper Country ever becomes widely known -- as the beauty of the Killarney Lakes, for instance, is known – it will be largely due to the love for this country felt by one man.
John T. Reeder is not a native of the northland. He went to it, in fact, from Detroit. That was many years ago. He had been connected with the Detroit Smelting Company in the early days of the copper industry. He came to the mines as purchasing agent for this company so many years ago that he has almost forgotten that he ever lived in Detroit.
It is a good many years, too, since Mr. Reeder has been a purchasing agent. But he has not been idle. Since he has been retired he has found time to make a mineral collection, of which not a few specimens are envied by the Michigan College of Mining and Technology, owner of one of the best mineral collections in the United States.
450 INDIAN PIPES
He has made a collection of Indian relics that includes 450 pipes alone – every one of them different and distinctive. He has pipes with bowls shaped like human heads, like human bodies, like fishes, like birds, etc.
These pipes are made of sandstone, soapstone and various other materials. The pipes are but a fraction in this notable Indian collection.
But neither in minerals nor in Indian relics does he express his deep love for the northernmost part of Michigan’s mainland. His service, instead is in the medium of photography. The camera is the instrument by which he interprets the various moods of a unique and lovely country.
Mr. Reeder is now 71 years old, and for more than a quarter century he has been making photographs -- none of which are for sale, but many of which are given away to those who can sense the summer compensation that that nature makes for the rigorous winter she sends to the copper region. In this land of slow growth, amid the cool airs of Lake Superior, nature refines her colors. The green of the tall and graceful conifers is not simply green. It is every imaginable shade of green. The color of what we know as the violet is an etherealization of violet. To an eye accustomed to the bolder and more vigorous painted by a hotter and a longer summer the delicacy of shade found in the simplest wood flower of the copper district is a revelation of what nature can do by way of making up for snowstorms on Easter Day and the likelihood of another on or about the first of September.
SHARES OF LOVELINESS
It is in the field of color photography that Mr. Reeder pays Houghton and Keweenaw Counties for the pleasure they have given him these many years. These pictures are taken on the well-known Lumiere plates and then made into lantern slides. In the long and cold winter Mr. Reeder shares the beauty he has garnered up during the summer with the friends he invites to witness his impromptu exhibitions of loveliness then dormant beneath the enormous drifts.
For years Mr. Reeder and Prof. James Fisher, head of the department of mathematics and physics at the Michigan College of Mining and Technology have been in friendly competition in the discovery of orchids native to this narrow peninsula. MR. Reeder has found 35 varieties and Prof. Fisher a few less. The discovery of a new orchid to either of these two friends is as the winning of a battle might have been to one of the Caesars.
SHYEST OF FLOWERS
The orchid – shyest, rarest and loveliest of flowers – perhaps is as plentiful in other parts of the state as in the Lake Superior region. Perhaps other counties only lack two such enthusiastic trackers on the orchid trail as Mr. Reeder and Mr. Fisher.
But the fact is that Mr. Reeder was able to lead a national authority on flowers to an orchid he had sought in vain for 20 years.
The authority was Raymond H. Torrey, field secretary of the National Conference on State Parks, sponsored by the Laura Spellman Rockefeller Memorial. Mr. Torrey was north to consider the park possibilities of Isle Royale. He was being driven toward the tip of the Keewenaw [sic] Peninsula, when the conversation turned to orchids.
WISH QUICKLY GRANTED
“I think I would give an eye, or at least my right hand, to catch sight of a Calypso,” sighed the distinguished visitor.
“A Calypso?” repeated Mr. Reeder. “I can show you a Calypso within five minutes.”
“You don’t really mean it?”
“I certainly do. All we have to do is to stop the car and look around a bit.”
Within five minutes Mr. Reeder laid a Calypso in the right hand that Mr. Torrey had offered to sacrifice for a sight of this rarest flower in a rare species.
“Do you realize,” Mr. Torrey asked, “that I have been in practically every state and national park in America and that I have been hunting in rain for what you have just given me?”
“It took you a long time to get to the right place,” laughed Mr. Reeder. “If I had time I could find you 20 Calypsoes [sic] within a mile of where we are standing.”
The place where they were standing was near Ft. Wilkins, that quaint reconstruction of long ago about which the state has set aside 120 acres as a park. This park is nearly 500 miles from Detroit, but within the last year the visitors to it – most of them from the southern part of the state – leaped from a few hundreds to more than 40,000.
Keewenaw [sic] County not only has Ft. Wilkins, but it has Eagle Harbor, where the lighthouse and the summer hotel look out on a series of cruel rocks against which Lake Superior forever breaks in foaming spray. Keewenaw [sic] also has Copper Harbor, northernmost of Michigan’s mainland, and Eagle River, near which our first state geologist, the talented Douglass Houghton, lost his life when his boat battled the jagged rocks.
MAGNETS FOR THE EYE
Keewenaw [sic] and Houghton Counties have as magnets for the eye such streams as the Pilgrim, where it is said that “anybody can catch a trout;” the Otter, the last stand of the almost extinct grayling; the Sturgeon, where the cold and crystal water leaps over one of the many waterfalls; Lake Fanny Hooe, separated from Superior by a narrow divide of land. Keewenaw [sic] and Houghton have rugged cliffs, gleaming with their copper content, to remind the traveled of Bear Creek Canyon in Colorado.
STILL MINING
They have, of course, the tall shafts of the Calumet & Hecla and numerous other mines silhouetted against the fleecy northern sky. They have their mining towns, which the newcomer expects be as sordid as mining towns are in the Pennsylvania coal regions, and finds they are not. Instead lilacs bloom before almost every dooryard.
Mr. Reeder, at 71, not only takes pictures, but also develops the negatives and makes his own enlargements on photographic paper he buys in the roll – because he uses so much of it. He has not worked in the commercial sense, for many years, but when he is not busy in the fireproof studio vault in which he stores his many thousands of pictures, he is in the field looking for wild flowers, rare minerals … and always for orchids.
“It is quite true,” he told me, “that nature compensates man for a cold climate. Plant life here is not forced. Everything attains maturity slowly. We have the cool air of Yellowstone, and the long hours of moderately warm sunshine that makes the flowers bloom so beautifully in Alaska.”
The Copper Country so skillfully interpreted in Mr. Reeder’s photographs is lovely in itself. But I suspect that part of its charm is due to the feeling one brings to it of evanescence – or early death. In midsummer it has the same melancholy appeal – because it is so swiftly passing – made by the gorgeous Upper Peninsula autumn – an autumn that goes to the chill arms of winter clothed in an almost unbelievable vividness of raiment.
BEAUTY OF NORTHLAND
The beauty of the northland is as the beauty of a loved woman from whom one is soon to part forever. The smile of a summer that so swiftly is to give way to winter wrenches at the heart, and every charm becomes a stab, every last bit of fleeting loveliness a wound.
“I guess,” says Mr. Reeder, the philosopher and poet of photography, “that we see in a country only what we bring to it. I have brought to this country a love for its every phase, and it has given me in return the pictures that you are kind enough to call beautiful.”
We invite you back next Sunday for a recent article about J.T. Reeder, and more about the vast gem collection for which he is remembered. Our thanks to Mike Cooper for sharing from his shoebox these memories of his Great Grandad.
Have a good week :o)
