Aultman And Garrison Collections

Aultman Family Collection:

The Aultman Studio, established in Trinidad, Colorado, from 1889 through the 1990s, is Colorado's oldest continually-operating photographic portrait studio. The Colorado Historical Society purchased more than 36,000 gelatin dry plate glass and cellulose nitrate film negatives from the studio in 1966. The holdings represent the work of studio founder Oliver Aultman, his brothers Everett and Otis, and his son, Glenn, from 1889 to 1927. The collection also includes earlier photographs by the studio's predecessor, the pioneer Sante Fe Trail photographer Dana B. Chase. Approximately eighty-five percent of the negatives now owned by CHS are studio portraits reflecting the ethnic and socio-economic diversity of the southern Colorado coal fields. The balance are Trinidad street scenes and commercial views, Cirkut panoramas of industrial sites, views of the mines, coal breakers, company towns, and ethnic settlements throughout the region.

The Aultman Studio collection is widely used by scholars of industrial and labor history, especially those concerned with people or events connected to the Ludlow Massacre of 1914. It has provided source material for researchers studying the culture and politics of the Albanian, Bulgarian, Chinese, Cornish, Croatian, Czech, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Mexican, Polish, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, and Ukranian immigrants who arrived in southern Colorado between 1885 and 1925. It continues to be a unique source of information and images for people studying family history.

Ola & Fred Garrison Collection:

Ola Aftinson learned photography as a retoucher and colorist in the Grand Junction, Colorado studio of Frank Dean in the early 1900s. In 1910, she capitalized on the influx of people and money into the Grand Valley during the shale oil boom to open her own photography studio in the town of DeBeque. In 1915, when oil shale economics took their inevitable turn for the worse, she moved to nearby Rifle, Colorado, to work for Fred Garrison, the photographer who had been her only competitor for the previous five years. Aftinson and Garrison were married in 1920. The Aftinson/Garrison collection includes approximately five hundred glass negatives by Ola Aftinson and 800 more from the Garrison studio, which cannot be positively attributed to either Ola Aftinson Garrison or to her husband. The collection is a rich document of a crucial phase in the history of western Colorado and a worthwhile sample of early work by a professional woman photographer in Colorado. Other CHS holdings of similar work -- by such photographers as Mrs. B. B. Chase, Sophie Harkulas, and Julia Skolas are not as complete or as extensive as those in the Aftinson/Garrison collection. Digitization will make the contents of this collection fully available to researchers for the first time.

Here are some sample scans from the collections and associated catalog records.