FRONTIER PHOTOGRAPHER

ALBERT C. STEWART'S TONGUE SIZZLED with the word of God. In 1916, camera in hand, Stewart left his family’s Nebraska farm to undertake missionary work for the American Sunday School Union. According to The Journal of Arizona History, the union’s motto was “We go where others don’t.”

For Stewart, that slogan was true. “There is no place too isolated for me to reach or too small for my visits,” he said, according to the April 18, 1917, edition of Pres-cott’s Weekly Journal-Miner. Stewart frequently walked up to 35 miles a day to reach remote mining camps, homesteads, cattle ranches and other small communities. He found joy in donating money and clothing to struggling homestead families along the way.
 

Stewart organized Sunday schools throughout these isolated areas. Homesteaders’ wives who wanted to earn more money for their families often taught the classes. The Weekly Journal-Miner described quick support for one of Stewart’s schools near Jerome Junction — now a ghost town: “It is only by co-operation that the fruitful month’s work, just ended, has been made possible.”

Stewart wanted to document his work and the rural conditions he came upon, so he snapped photographs throughout his ventures — probably with a No. 1 Panoram Kodak, made for sweeping landscapes and large groups. His images, published by The Sunday-School Missionary magazine, provide a “view of these struggling workers who are underrepresented in our visual history,” according to The Journal of Arizona History.

In 1943, after nearly 30 years as a missionary, Stewart retired to the life of a Tucson minister. He died in 1966. Today, Stewart’s photographs are housed at the Arizona Historical Society Library and Archives in Tucson.