I camped in early spring near the Lookout Mountain Battlefield Trail System in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and hiked where both Union and Confederate soldiers had trod during the late fall of 1863. I’m an amateur photographer who has spent countless hours in a darkroom printing black and white film, and a primary target of the trip was a visit to Ochs Museum and Observatory, where some of Robert Michael Linn’s photography is on display.
According to Chattanoogan Anthony Hodges, a retired dentist and a collector of Civil War photographs since age 16, Linn was originally from Marion, Ohio, but his work as a civilian mapmaker and photographer with the Union army landed him in Chattanooga. Linn’s work is a snapshot of an important era in American history.
In his 2018 three-part series in Military Images magazine, Mr. Hodges wrote: “Captivated by Lookout Mountain, Linn had leased the mountain’s northern terminus from the James A. Whiteside family shortly after the fighting ended. Linn established a “photograph” business, [for] which he christened his new studio Gallery Point Lookout.”
The Civil War was half over in late 1863, when Linn established his photography studio near where Ochs Museum and Observatory currently sits, on a precipice 2,000 feet above the Tennessee River. In November 1863, Northern and Southern forces battled it out, with the Union forces overcoming the Confederates and occupying Chattanooga.
The trail system that includes Ochs Museum and Observatory offers easy-to-moderate and moderate-to-strenuous hikes. One of those trails leads to Ochs, where visitors can marvel at Linn’s high-contrast black and white images. Not only do some of the photographs feature soldiers who survived the Lookout Mountain battle, but also many who returned sometime later in the war or post-war to have their photograph taken alone or with family members. In fact, “tens of thousands of veterans passing through the city on their way home provided a steady customer base,” Mr. Hodges said.
Photographer at the Scene
Linn was arguably in the right place at the right time. He built a simple shed as an office for processing film and a large-format-print camera to capture fine details. “Linn helped popularize photography, especially the practice of making copies to give to family and friends,” Mr. Hodges said. “People especially collected the photos Linn made of famous Civil War people, like Gen. Joe Hooker and Gen. George Thomas, who had their photos made on Lookout.”Ochs’s exhibit of Linn’s work includes the glass-plate negative of a most distinct image that appears to be of Gen. Ulysses S. Grant looking up at Union soldiers sitting on rock outcroppings. However, Mr. Hodges notes, “There are some discrepancies in the uniform. He appears to have a tree branch in his mouth and not a cigar, and Grant supposedly did not spend much time on Lookout Mountain after the battle. But we cannot know for certain [if Grant is pictured] because there is no documentation. I’m not prepared to say it’s not Grant, but I’m not completely convinced that it is Grant. Ironically, this is the most widely known of Linn’s images.”
With the success of Linn’s business, he was joined by his brother, James Birney Linn, who had served with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. According to Mr. Hodges’ research, Robert returned to Ohio and died of influenza in 1872, but James, as well as one of Robert’s sons, George, continued operating the photography business, with James dying at age 77 in 1922 and George continuing until 1938.
“In 1939, the National Park Service (NPS) approved the building of the Ochs Museum and Observatory atop the old Linn studio,” Mr. Hodges explained. He lent NPS some original photographs from his private collection of over 200 of Linn’s images so that they could be scanned for the museum.
Today, Ochs is a place where walkers and hikers can experience a time and place, and people captured forever in striking images, all due to Linn’s foresight and resourcefulness.
