A Foss family portrait shows Maud and Albra to either side of Thurza’s second husband, Franklin Foss. Behind them are Clara and Thurza. Photo from the Collection of Ellen Mallow
With the passage by Congress of the Private Mailing Act of 1898, postcards became a widely popular means of communication, a souvenir of travel, and an object of collecting. Most American cards were mass produced color lithographs, many of which were printed in Germany. However, enterprising Maine photographers such as Herman Cassens and Charles A. Townsend of Belfast and the Cunningham brothers of Washington made real photo postcards by printing views of local subjects from their glass plate negatives. Nothing was too commonplace to escape their cameras, including main streets, churches, schools, farmsteads, businesses, factories, lumber camps, and sailing vessels.
By the early twentieth century, Maine photography was no longer solely a man’s world, and this was especially true in the case of real photo postcards. Among the talented woman photographers who produced cards of their localities were Minnie F. Libby of Norway, Nettie Cummings Maxim of Lockes Mills, Josephine Davis Townsend of Monhegan Island, and Thurza E. Foss of Harmony.
Of particular interest are Foss’s views of rural Somerset County prior to World War I.
Foss was born in St. Albans, Maine, on June 11, 1860, the daughter of Thomas and Hannah Merryman, who had moved from Harpswell to farm in Harmony, then a town of 1,081 residents.
When she was 15, in 1876, she married Howard W. Hurd, a local farmer. Their son, Harry Leroy Hurd, was born in 1877. Howard Hurd was shot and killed five years later, on August 5, 1882, by his brother, Eugene, in a dispute over haying a field on the family farm.
Following this tragedy, she remarried in 1884 to Franklin B. Foss, a Civil War veteran of the First Maine Cavalry and a farmer 20 years her senior. They had three daughters, Clara Bell, Maud Emma, and Albra Lulu Foss.
After Frank Foss’s death in 1901, Thurza Foss took up photography to help support her family and supplement her farming income. Between 1903 and 1917, she produced real photo postcards of Harmony and the surrounding towns of Athens, Blanchard, Brighton, Ripley, and Wellington. With a refreshing directness and clarity, she created such topical views of Harmony as apple pickers, lumberjacks driving logs on Higgins Stream, the arrival of the town’s first passenger train in 1912, and the 1913 Fourth of July parade. She signed her cards with the printed block letters T.E.F., T.E. Foss, and Mrs. T.E. Foss. Occasionally, she used the ink stamp Mrs. T.E. Foss Harmony.
One of the first references to Foss’s photography is a 1903 newspaper report that she received an award at the Athens Fair for her “camera views.” In 1906 she wrote to her daughter Clara that “I was out taking pictures yesterday.”
The following 1908 request to a photographic supplier in Dexter reveals that she was making portraits as well as postcards: “Will you send me two doz. 5 x 8 portrait paper by mail as soon as possible. The paper I have on hand does not allow much margin for my last group. I shall need 500 postcards soon. Please order a package if you haven’t them on hand. Can wait for the large mounts and postcards, but the paper I need now.”
During her years as a photographer, Foss continued to maintain her farm, finding time to make cheese, sell maple syrup, and acquire a bull considered “one of the best in Somerset County.”
She was active in her town, serving as the longtime secretary of the Harmony Grange. When she died in 1937 at the age of 77, the Bangor Daily News stated that “she will be missed in the community as she was always ready to help one in need.”
Today we remember Foss as a woman who bravely met the challenges of her life and left a rich legacy of photographs of rural Maine.
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Earle G. Shettleworth, Jr. directed the Maine Historic Preservation Commission from 1976 to 2015, and has been the Maine State Historian since 2004.
