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Benjamin Howe Conant
(1843-1921)

Benjamin H. Conant was a Civil War veteran, a shoemaker, Wenham's first librarian, an historian, an organist and clerk at the Wenham Congregational Church, custodian of the town clock and a photographer.

From 1890 - 1921 Mr. Conant traveled around Wenham and methodically documented houses, streets, and people - keeping carefull track of names, and dates. Today, over 3600 glass plate negatives of his work still exist in the Wenham Museums archives. They still produce clear beautiful prints.

In an effort to preserve and utilize these images for exhibits and for our researchers and visitors, the Wenham Museum is embarking on a project to scan a large majority of them at high resolution. These high quality scans will allow us to produce the much sought after prints without touching the extremely fragile glass-plates. Thanks to a partnership grant from the Essex County Heritage Commission in 2006, 100 of Conant's images have been scanned and placed into this small searchable database. The images you see have been selected by our long time historican and archivist, Harold Boothroyd, who is a talented photographer himself. Montserrat College of Art Intern Hope Seaverns, has scanned the images and carefully entered all the information from Conant's notebooks into the description.

Prints of the images you see, as well as others, are available for purchase. Please contact the Wenham Museum for further information at (978) 468-2377 or email us at info@wenhammuseum.org


Any Wenham Museum material desired for publication , or other use, in any form is subject to the payment of a usage fee (over and above photographic reproduction costs) and written permission must be obtained from the Wenham Museum prior to use. For all uses, a credit line must be included as follows: " Image Courtesy of the Wenham Museum, Wenham MA. " For further information please contact the Wenham Museum at (978) 468-2377.  info@wenhammuseum.org