Photo Scrapbook Shows Life And Leisure During The Gilded Age On Long Island

(LONG ISLAND). This scrapbook displays photographs taken between 1887-1889 that capture a wealthy familys life on Long Island during the Gilded Age. The term The Gilded Age, created by Mark Twain, refers to the period of the late nineteenth century (typically the 1870s through the turn of the 20th century) during which rapid economic growth, rapid industrialization, and widespread European immigration, primarily unskilled labor, transformed the economies of the Northern and Western United States. According to the United States Census, the era saw a real wage growth of 40% from 1860 to 1890, with the average annual wage per industrial worker (including men, women, and children) rising from $380 in 1880 ($11,523 in 2022 dollars) to $584 in 1890 ($18,370 in 2022 dollars), a gain of 59%. This rise in wealth resulted in the rise of a New Money elite, those who made their money not through generational wealth and family connections, but rather through oil, the railroads, and other rising industries. They are best exemplified by John D. Rockefeller, Jay Gould, Henry Clay Frick, Andrew Mellon, Andrew Carnegie, Henry Flagler, J. P. Morgan, Leland Stanford, and Cornelius Vanderbilt. New York was often at the center of the Gilded Age, as the worlds dominant financial market and the nations leader in economic investment immigration, political corruption, and culture. This scrapbook contains 59 black-and-white photographs. They are affixed or mounted to 43 (of 70) pages in the album. 29 of the photographs are 3.5 x 4.5, 19 are 6.5 x 4.5 and 11 are 5.5 x 7.5. Two of these images are cyanotypes. Though the family is not named in the album (and photographs with names underneath lead to nothing online), there is a photograph in front of a house labeled Westbrook. The Westbrook estate on Long Island was designed in 1886 for William Bayard Cutting (18501912) by the architect Charles C. Haight in the Tudor Revival style. It contained the first private golf course in the United States and is now a part of a state park called the Bayard-Cutting Arboretum. Cutting started the sugar beet industry in the United States in 1888, was a builder of railroads, operated the ferries of New York City (his maternal grandfather was a partner of Robert Fulton), and developed part of the south Brooklyn waterfront, Red Hook. Images include a large extended family repeatedly and leisurely photographed, the Harvard-Yale sailing race in 1887 at New London, young men (likely Yale students) yachting and relaxing on a boat named the Princess, and beautiful images of the scenery and waters of Long Island. Overall, the album is in good shape. One photograph is damaged, and several others have minor tears or chips. The scrapbook is half-leather and half-cloth, so the spine is worn, and the corners are rubbed and bumped. Regardless, the scrapbook is a prize for anyone interested in this fascinating and relevant era in American history. It provides fantastic insight into the life of a wealthy Long Island family, including what they did, what they wore, and how they presented themselves to each other and their neighbors.