If you’ve ever wondered what Wauwatosa looked like and what city residents did for fun more than 100 years ago, the Lefeber Glass Plate Collection helps to answer those questions. Before rolls of film and decades before digital cameras, photographers captured images on glass plate negatives taken with a bellows camera.
Wauwatosa’s Lefeber family — brothers James, Abraham, and Joseph — opened a general store in the Village in 1886, where the more recently built Lefeber Point building stands today, at the corner of State Street and Harwood Avenue. James Lefeber and his son, Cornelius, were the photographers who captured 2,000 images that make up this visual time capsule of Wauwatosa from 1900 to 1935. The negatives were donated to the Wauwatosa Historical Society by the family in the early 2000s.
Images of the Lefeber store and the surrounding Village are prominent in this collection, revealing the setup of the old storefront, its employees, and the varied merchandise inside, with everything from school books to medicine and hats to house paint. From the negatives, we learned that the Lefebers imported oysters from as far away as New Haven and Baltimore, and freshly made oyster stew was one of the store’s specialties after a refrigeration system was installed in 1913.
Also included in the collection are many images of the Lefeber family in their leisure time — singing, reading, playing with toys (the Lefeber store had a toy department!), and even a group of young boys relaxing in a field, smoking cigarettes. The Lefebers also brought their camera along on vacations. Among the glass plates are images of the family exploring the sights of the Wisconsin Dells around 1910.
This collection gives the viewer a personal glimpse of the daily life of a prominent family and enriches the society’s collection of artifacts from this period of time in Wauwatosa. Although studio portraits were popular in this era, the Lefeber images distinguish themselves with their candid and enjoyable nature — facial expressions are genuine with no forced smiles or staged backgrounds.
The delicate Lefeber negatives come in two sizes — 5” x 4” and 5” x 7”. Carefully preserved before their donation, they remain in impeccable condition today, allowing for the images to be reproduced in beautiful detail. Using a digital scanner, volunteers at the Wauwatosa Historical Society’s Research Library dedicated many hours to converting all the glass plates to positive images for viewing.
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