Photographer Margaret DeMott Brown:
An Artful Documentarian
By Bill Jeffway
A version of this article runs in the Northern/Southern Dutchess News March 19, 2025
In recognition of Women’s History Month we look through the lens of local photographer Margaret DeMott Brown (1880-1959) and her partnership with four women in particular. Brown had important collaborations with local historian Helen Wilkinson Reynolds and DCHS, Vassar College Botanist Edith Roberts, and two generations of consecutive local theater leaders who were Vassar Professors: first Gertrude Buck and then Hallie Flanagan.
Brown arrived in Poughkeepsie from the mid-West in 1917 to open a professional photographic studio near Vassar College. She was described in newspapers as having an interest in the style of pictorialism and would offer “home portraiture and art photographs.” Pictorialism was, and remains, a form of photography that is highly artistic with strong moods and soft muted focus; sometimes described as counter to a literal documentary style. Before her local arrival she had studied with one of Pictorialism’s great photographers, Clarence H. White. But much of the work done in the examples we explore have an important documentary role which reveals Brown’s ability to navigate the two styles.
Helen Wilkinson Reynolds
Brown’s most consistent collaborator was the local historian, researcher/writer Helen Wilkinson Reynolds (1875-1943) with whom she maintained a close personal relationship. When Reynolds died, Brown put her photographic business aside and relocated to Massachusetts to spend the rest of her life with family.
The Dutchess County Historical Society was formed in 1914 and differed from many organizations at the time by inviting the participation of women (unlike the Dutchess County Society in the City of New York, for example). This gave Brown and Reynolds a platform they put to good use for nearly three decades.
Two collaborations were published in 1924 where Brown’s photographs had a supporting role: Poughkeepsie: the Origin and Meaning of the Word and Old Gravestones of Dutchess County, which was a transcription of nineteen thousand entries. In two subsequent books, Brown’s photographs were at least as important as the text: in 1929, Dutch Houses in the Hudson Valley Before 1776 (with an introduction by FDR) in 1929 and Dutchess County Doorways, in 1931, were published as books with a major focus on photography.
In 1938, Brown and Reynolds expanded their partnership to include Vassar College’s head of the Department of Botany, Edith Roberts. They produced the landmark publication The Role of Plant Life in the History of Dutchess County. Far ahead of its time, in what would today be called advocacy for the protection of native species and plants, the publication outlined the idea of a succession of plant associations, to help a broader general public understand the dynamic relationship of plant life over generations. Brown’s other collaborations with Roberts involved just the two of them.
Edith Roberts
Edith Roberts (1881-1977) was a pioneering ecologist and eminent scientist who grew up in rural New Hampshire, graduated from Smith College in 1905, and then obtained a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. Roberts worked for three years as an associate professor at Mount Holyoke College. When World War One broke out in 1917, she became a field representative for the U.S. Department of Agriculture traveling the county to advise women managing farms while their husbands were serving in the war in France.
In 1920, Roberts created the first ecological laboratory in the United States at Vassar which remains in operation today. Brown documented the workings of the laboratory and farm, as well as individual plants and plantings. Prior to the major work, The Role of Plant Life in the History of Dutchess County Brown and Roberts collaborated on, American Plants for American Gardens, in 1929, and American Ferns: How to Know, Grow and Use Them, in 1935.
Several hundred photographs of ferns by Brown in DCHS Collections reflect both the documentary (where rulers mark sizes and date stamps mark time) as well as the most artistic (one of which for example was the cover of the Poughkeepsie Garden Club’s 1936 annual booklet).
Gertrude Buck
The earliest innovator of local theater at Vassar College was Gertrude Buck (1871-1922) who was equally involved with the local Poughkeepsie Community Players. She first joined Vassar in 1897 and grew beyond the role of English professor to embrace local theater.
In part prompted by her early death, a campaign led by Vassar College President MacCracken resulted in the national publication by Macmillan of a play Buck had been working on locally. Helga and the White Peacock was written by Cornelia Meigs who worked with Buck and the Poughkeepsie Community Players. The photos in the book by Brown are of the local production in her early pictorialist style (see image) which emerged as the premier to what was a subsequent successful round of schools putting on the performance nationally.
Hallie Flanagan
Hallie Flanagan (1889-1969) was very specifically recruited to replace Gertrude Buck in the role of developing local theater. But the generational change could not have been more profound. Europe was emerging from the trauma of World War One in the 1920s with a growing interest in a radical new approach to theater. Flanagan spent a year at Vassar in 1925 before touring Europe in 1926, where she met up with Poughkeepsie-born Lee Miller who was just about to emerge as a “modern” photographic powerhouse. Miller came back with Flanagan and introduced people she had worked with in Paris like Ladislas Medgyès (who spoke at Vassar in 1927), and invited their participation locally.
An important part of this modern movement was clear, spare geometric stagecraft which gave Brown an entirely different platform to capture (see image).
Home portraiture
The promotion of Brown’s practice upon her local arrival in 1917 promised “home portraiture.” At the time she was likely not aware that her home portraiture would come to include the family of a US President: Franklin Roosevelt, and US Secretary of the Treasury: Henry Morgenthau of Fishkill. Although Brown never married or had children, descendants of her family through an aunt have generously shared many of the images in their private collections. Reports of Brown being close to the Roosevelts and Morgenthau family’s is preserved in hand written notes to Brown from each of them, inscribed on family photos Brown had taken of each family.
Brown’s series of photographs of ferns, because of the large scale of the project and timeframe, offer the greatest range of artful to purely documentary in nature. DCHS Collections.
The 1921 opening of Vassar College’s Alumnae House was the occasion for a publication that featured photographs by Brown that captured the spirit of Pictorialism. DCHS Collections.