From the Press of Courier Post, February 19, 2005 ..... Amid termites, art treasuresCentury-ago black family’s portraits are found in A.C.By WILLIAM H SOKOLICCourier-Post StaffATLANTIC CITYRalph Hunter isn’t given to rummaging through termite-infested crawl spaces under old homes, but he’s glad he did in August.Dressed in gear suitable for dealing with germ warfare, Hunter burrowed under a house on North Michigan Avenue in search of antiques and crawled out with something more remarkable and unexpected: nine portraits of an affluent African-American family from a century ago. “I think it’s the greatest find ever in southern New Jersey,” said Hunter, an antiques collector and director of the African American Heritage Museum in Newtonville, Buena Vista. Hunter tapped art restoration expert Earl K. Parker III of Williamstown to clear away the mud and silt and put life back in the paintings. He also welcomed the help of an area genealogist, Walt McClister, to put some names and history to the rediscovered faces. McClister identified the patriarch of the family as Jeremiah Pettijohn, who moved to Atlantic City from Delaware in the late 1870s. Seven of the portraits - photographic images overlayed with charcoal and pastel - are on loan to the Atlantic City Art Center on Garden Pier through the end of the month. Hunter, who will take the exhibit throughout the tri-state area in the next year, will speak about his discovery Sunday at the center. An Atlantic City resident, Hunter was invited to sift through old furniture in the Michigan Avenue house by the resident who was moving out after 30 years. “In the shed, I saw an old table. I pulled it out and on top was a portrait,” he said. Told there might be other interesting finds underneath the house, Hunter returned the next morning. Amid damp soil and termites, he unearthed dishes from the old Shelbourne Hotel, dated 1907 and 1919. He crawled north and cleared several inches of dirt away. “I saw this lady looking at me. I pulled her up,” Hunter said. “Every time I dug another inch, I found more of these drawings. I found a little girl, another woman, a gentleman.” Hunter let the nine paintings dry out for a couple weeks, then brought some to his museum. A fortuitous moment occurred when Parker stopped by looking for directions to Millville, and left with the task of restoring the portraits. “It was quite a challenge to scrape off as much as I could to see the image underneath it,” said Parker, a 20-year veteran who has restored works by Picasso, Dali and Renoir. What he found were “crayon portraits,” a process used between the 1860s and early 1900s in which a photographer and artist worked together. A faint image of a photo was projected onto paper. The artist took charcoal and pastel and drew over the picture to bring out more detail. “This was not a standard practice back then,” Parker said. “It was more of the elite thing to do. If you got a crayon portrait, it was a little more special. This says a lot about the affluence of the Pettijohn family.” The restorations took several months. Parker photographed the portraits so he had an image to work from. “I scraped away the bad parts and repatched and refilled,” said Parker, one of the few restorers who work in this medium. “It’s almost like a surgeon who does an operation,” said the Edgewood High graduate. With new paper and the same charcoal and pastel, he reproduced what was missing. “I kept as much of the original as possible,” Parker said. To date, McClister has identified the subjects of only two of the portraits: Jeremiah Pettijohn and his daughter, Leola, then a little girl. After arriving in Atlantic City at age l9, Jeremiah took a job as a runner at the Shelbourne, delivering telegrams and other messages to hotel guests. He graduated to elevator operator, and then to bellman. According to records, he purchased the Victorian home on North Michigan Avenue in 1910 for $8,000, not inexpensive in those days. McClister discovered Jeremiah had four wives, but only one child, Leola, who became a schoolteacher in Atlantic City. She married and moved to Delaware where she continued to teach school She died at age 90 in 1973. No living relatives remain in Atlantic City, Hunter said. How the portraits got under the house, no one knows. ‘There’s a lot of theories. The one I like is that when Jeremiah got married again, the new wife wouldn’t permit the portraits of these people in her home,” Hunter said. Reach William H. Sokolic at (609)823-9159 or wsokolic@courierpostonline.com HOW TO HELP- Anyone with information about the Pettijohn family is asked to call Ralph Hunter at the African American Heritage Museum, (609) 704-7262.- For information, call (609) 347-5837 or log onto www.aclink.org/acartcenter or www.africanamericanheritagemuseum.org [Photo #1] The nine portraits of Jeremiah Pettijohn, his daughter Leola and, presumably, other members of the early 1900s Atlantic City family are on display at the Atlantic City Arts enter (photo: JOHN ZIOMEK, Courier Post)
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