October 4 - H.H. Bennett Museum in Wisconsin Dells, Wisconsin

For our last full day in the area we decided to return to the Wisconsin Dells to see the H. H. Bennett photography museum. The museum doesn’t have large garish plastic signs out front like most of the other “attractions” in the town, so our fist problem was finding it. Fortunately the commercial area along the main street is only 5 blocks long and we knew it was in there somewhere, so we just parked the car and walked along until we spotted it.

We bought our tickets in the gift shop and entered the museum that lies partly in the back of one building but also includes the entire first floor of an adjacent building that was Bennett’s original late 1800s studio. This was a smart way of arranging it because the old studio has been kept in absolutely pristine condition—in fact they still use part of it for a darkroom where they make prints from Bennett’s old negatives to sell in the gift shop. What made this all possible was the fact that Bennett’s descendants kept the studio running until 1998 and then turned it over intact to the state historical society that now runs the place.

My father and grandfather ran photography studios and I like photography myself, so you can well imagine that I was fascinated by all the old cameras and the techniques used by Bennett to take marvelous pictures of the Dells. I was surprised by the plethora of stereoscopic prints that Bennett took, since that is now an almost lost art, but the commercial market in the late 1800s was for the stereoscopic viewers that the Victorians used instead of TV, so naturally that’s what Bennett had to FOCUS on (Sorry!).

The displays included several booths where you could use special polarized glasses to look at Bennett’s stereoscopic prints shown on a computer monitor—that way you got the real 3-dimensional effect that made these photographs so striking to view. Even though they are black-and-white, these photographs are still very striking pictures of the beautiful scenery and rock formations of the Dells and the surrounding Wisconsin area. Monika got a headache from the stereo glasses, so they don’t work for everyone, but I spent a good half an hour there looking at all the available pictures.

I was particularly interested in a complete sequence of pictures that Bennett took which documented all stages of floating log rafts down the Wisconsin River to the Mississippi for sale. These pictures preserved a lot of information about the actual techniques used to handle those big rafts in such a way that folks like me over a century later could get some basic understanding of how it was done. Another sequence of pictures followed the course of the Wisconsin River through the Dells and showed almost every major rock formation in stunning 3-dimensional views. You really shouldn’t miss this picture exhibition because it’s just like taking the boat tours but a whole lot quicker! In fact, I pondered on whether it would be better to come to the museum and look at all those pictures before going on the boat tours of the Dells, and I think that might be a really good idea for other folks.

But Bennett was truly a genius. He invented many of his own devices to facilitate both the taking of the pictures and their commercial production. One thing he invented was a foot-driven machine to cut and mount the stereoscopic prints that greatly improved his productivity and profitability. Apparently he was also the first person to perfect the camera shutter and take true stop-action pictures. Bennett’s picture of his son Ashley jumping from a cliff over to a rock tower is justly famous and won a national award for Bennett. Reviewing all the pictures on the computer, the stop-action picture that I liked best was the one of the raft crew throwing a mooring rope to a crewmember on shore—the uncoiling rope is caught in mid-flight by Bennett’s stereo camera and looks like a huge strand of frozen spaghetti.

But the real sign of Bennett’s genius is the pictures themselves. They are striking not just because of the 3-D effect—Bennett really was a master craftsman in composing and taking striking black-and-white pictures. Taking good black-and-white pictures requires a highly developed sensitivity to light, shadow, and the basic forms and textures of the objects in the frame since those are the only things available for the visual perception of the picture. In contrast, I’ve found in my experience that taking good color pictures requires a different sensitivity to the color blends and contrasts of the hues of the objects in the picture, and these considerations often dictate a different composition or even a completely different theme for a photograph. Since you can print pictures either in color or black-and-white, it’s sometimes interesting to print them both ways to see the differences—if you do that I think you will find that the “best” prints will be different pictures for the black-and-white prints versus the color prints. Anyway, if you have any interest in photography you really ought to stop by the Bennett museum and look at all the old photography studio and the pictures.

After spending a couple of hours in the museum we took a look at the gift shop and I bought a poster of a very large panoramic print by Bennett. To get the wide angle he wanted, Bennett had to use 3 large glass plate negatives taken from the same vantage point. The print is a wonderful view out across the Dells from underneath an overhanging rock, but the amazing thing about the print is you absolutely cannot see where one negative ended and the next one began. Somehow he managed to overlap and merge them perfectly in the printing process, and to this day they don’t understand exactly how he did it. For $9, I considered it a bargain.

We still had a half an hour on our parking meter, so Monika and I walked down the main street looking for a place for lunch. We settled on a place called Culver’s because of some very enticing billboards we had seen in the area and because there was a crowd of local folks in there—always a good sign. The pot roast sandwiches and fries we had were in fact excellent—there was so much meat on the sandwich that if fell out of the sides and it was so tasty that we finally resorted to eating the scraps with our fingers (couldn’t find any forks). We even had a chocolate and butterscotch sundae with nuts afterwards, called a “Turtle” on the menu for reasons not obvious to me, but the quality and consistency of the soft ice cream custard was perfect.

Completely refreshed, we thought we might want to try the steam train that was advertised. There was one where we were in the Dells and another one advertised at New Freedom about 20 miles south. After some confusion we managed to find the Dells steam train on the northern edge of town, but were somewhat disappointed. The train was REALLY narrow gauge and VERY small. It seemed fine for children, but at 6 foot 2 inches tall, I would have had to do a lot of folding to cram into one of the carriages. So instead we decided to do some shopping back in the commercial strip because we were looking for, of all things, a cribbage board.

This admittedly odd shopping goal was due to our experiences in our new trailer. We felt we just might have some spare time and sufficient warmth to play cards in the evening. We did that on some trips many years ago, but gave it up when camping in the winter because it just isn’t fun when your hands holding the cards go numb—hard to shuffle, among other things. We wandered up and down the commercial district for another hour or so, but our search was in vain. All the shops wanted at least $15 for a cribbage board and it’s kind of hard to justify that much money for a piece wood with 60 holes drilled in it—I even made one for us in the old camping days. You know, it is still probably laying in the garage somewhere so if we don’t find a nice one, we will just wait until we get home and find the old one.

Back at the trailer I lit the water heater so that Monika could take her first shower in the trailer. It was a lot warmer than the one in the bathrooms and although the space was small, it worked perfectly. While we still had some daylight we decided to take another walk along Mirror Lake and explore some more of the trails in the park. We walked down to the boat launch area and turned south along the lake passing a beach area until we reached the bridge over the stream feeding the lake. On the way back we took a nice cross-country skiing trail that looped past the campgrounds. The trails in both Mirror Lake and in Devils Lake State Parks seem to be designed with cross-country skiing in mind and are wide, nicely graded, and easy to walk on.

After we got back to our campsite, we decided to have an evening fire using mostly gathered wood so that we did not have to use our precious two by fours—most of those were in use propping up the corners of the trailer since our campsite was rather uneven. Fortunately the stuff we gathered burned well and made a beautiful fire that we enjoyed while dusk fell. After it all burned down we put the fire out and moved back into the trailer for the rest of the evening. Now it was time for me to try the shower—there were a few awkward Moments because of the confined space, but it worked well and I had a nice shower without the bone-chilling experience of being wet in a cold bathroom.