[Alaska]. [Photography]

[Two Photographs of Midnight Summer Baseball and Scenes in Early 20th-Century Chatanika, Alaska]

[Fairbanks, Ak.]: Huey Foto, 1909-1910. Two original photographs, 6 x 8 inches each. Mounted on black card stock. Later, fairly extensive, manuscript annotations on mount versos. Light wear to mount edges. A bit of soiling and wear at edges of second photograph. Very good. Item #6163

A pair of original, larger format photographs that depict midnight summer scenes in Chatanika, Alaska, just north of Fairbanks, during 1909 and 1910. The later image, credited to Huey and Hyland Foto, is captioned, "Midnight Ball Game Fairbanks -Vs.- Chatanika. June 19 - 1910," and shows a healthy crowd of spectators and the game in progress with a batter at the plate from a vantage point down the right field line, behind first base. The first photograph, captioned, "Chatanika Alaska July 4th One A.M. 1909," and is credited to Huey alone. It depicts a large crowd of men, women, and at least three babies arrayed across a large pile of logs and stones, a setting which seems to be the same as appears behind home plate and the third base line in the photo of the baseball game. A midnight baseball game in Fairbanks during high summer in Alaska has been a tradition since 1905 or 1906, and has variously been called the "Lights-Out Baseball Game," the "Midnight Sun Game," and the "High Noon at Midnight Classic." Thus, in the present photographs we have an early images of Alaskan sports heritage and more generally of late-night summer culture in Alaska during the early-20th century. We find little of Huey and Hyland's photographic work in online records; a small handful of photos held by the Alaska State Library show them to be an operation entirely local to Fairbanks in the first decade of the 1900s.

Price: $750.00