Item No. 4747990

A CDV view of Salt Lake City, Utah. Two churches are featured in the image among the city’s houses and shops, while a group of local children pose casually for the camera. On the verso is Savage’s imprint advertising his Pioneer Art Gallery on East Temple Street in Salt Lake City. It indicates that the company was “late Savage & Ottinger,” suggesting that the image dates to circa 1870. A handwritten inscription reads, “Catholic & Episcopal churches from north / Wasatch Mts. in perspective.” Measures about 4 1/8” x 2 1/2”.

The CDV was at one time a gift from Joseph B. Rosborough, a gold rush transplant from Chester District, South Carolina, to his sister Jane Rosborough Wilson’s family back East. J. B. Rosborough maintained a law office in Salt Lake City in the 1880s and did business throughout the West.

Charles R. Savage was a British-born photographer who became one of the foremost visual chroniclers of the American West. After immigrating to the United States and learning photography as an ambrotypist in New York, he joined the LDS Church, crossed the plains with his family to Utah in 1860, and established a studio in Salt Lake City. In the late 1860s he operated his studio with partner George M. Ottinger (as Savage & Ottinger). The partnership dissolved in 1870 and Savage continued business into the 1890s under his own name. Best remembered for his 1869 photographs of the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad at Promontory, Savage spent decades documenting western landscapes, railroad expansion, settlements, and pioneer life, leaving behind an enduring photographic record of the developing frontier.