Brazos Past: Early photographers of Waco
By Terri Jo Ryan
Tribune-Herald staff writer
Waco, in its early days, was home to several tradesmen who “painted with light,” as the photographer’s art was sometimes known.
Photographer William D. Jackson Sr. of Waco was a frequent advertiser in the old Waco Tribune, quite often on the same page as Cotton Belt Railroad.
Other names from Waco’s distant photographic past include M.L. Sanders, 1908 president of the Texas Professional Photographers Association Inc. TPPA was founded in 1898, and boasted as its first president the famous Jervis C. Deane of Waco, who had lost his right eye to red-hot flying debris two years earlier while photographing the Crash at Crush staged train wreck north of town.
Deane was the brother of photographers Granville M. and Martin O. Deane, who worked in various Kansas and Texas venues over the years. Jervis C. Deane worked as a house painter in Hannibal, Mo.; studied photography in Europe; and toured the United States as an itinerant photographer before landing in Waco about 1888. He partnered with Forrest T. Morgan for the next three years, and worked in Waco until 1901.
Sources: Biographies of Western Photographers, by Carl Mautz, Ancestry.com, Genealogy.com, TexasEscapes.com, Handbook of Waco and McLennan County, edited by Dayton Kelley.
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