Archive Farms The Patrick Montgomery Collection, Object No. 2012.012
Caption: George L Andrews and his wife examine two of the Brady glass plate negatives that turned up in their barn. They had lain in the barn for 25 years, wrapped in old newspapers. According to Robert Wilson in his 2013 book "Mathew Brady, Portraits of a Nation", Brady closed his Washington gallery on August 27, 1873, but it was reopened two months later by a former employee Andrew Burgess. After emerging from bankruptcy in 1875, Brady bought back the studio from Burgess, who moved to Oswego, NY but apparently took some of the studio contents including three small wooden boxes containing 44 negatives. After Burgess widow died in 1926, the negatives were left to the wife of the executor of Mrs Burgess estate, whose son George Andrews (pictured above) discovered two of the boxes in his barn in 1948.
