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Moments in
time
By Olivia Maddox
Moments in time
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| With camera equipment
in hand, J. C. Allen, pictured at left across from the
Purdue University gates, was a familiar sight on campus
for more than 40 years. His cameras, ledgers and photos
are preserved by his grandson, John Allen. |
When newlyweds J. C. and Abby Allen went
to the 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis, one of the
things that they purchased for the trip was a portable
Kodak camera. It was J. C.'s first venture into photography
and the beginning of an odyssey that over the next 70 years
would take him coast to coast and bring him national acclaim. Life would get off to a somewhat rocky start
for young J. C. His mother died when he was only 18 months
old, and his father, a Union Army officer wounded during
the Civil War, died just a few years later. Before the elder
Allen succumbed, he arranged for his 6-year-old son to live
at the Indiana Soldier's and Sailor's Children's
Home. The Knightstown, Ind., facility had been founded in
1865 to raise and educate orphaned and destitute children
of Civil War Union Army veterans. A farm operated by the home provided J.
C. with some of his earliest agricultural training, and,
upon graduation in 1897 at the age of 16, he began to make
his way in the world. He worked on a railroad crew and as
a coal miner, a farm hand, and a telegraph operator, gaining
a wide range of skills and education. After marrying Mary
Abby Peavy in 1904, he settled down into marriage, and the
couple began farming along the Indiana-Illinois state line. J. C. developed an expertise in livestock
and agronomy, and it was these skills that led him to the
animal husbandry department at Purdue's College of Agriculture
in 1909. According to notes J. C. made later in life, he
was hired by Purdue to work in "livestock judging, animal
nutrition, agronomy and poultry." Soon after his trip to the World's
Fair, J. C. bought another camera, but by-passed newer models
and celluloid roll film for an older, wooden box camera that
used 5- x 7-inch glass plates because of the clarity of the
photographs. He quickly combined avocation and vocation. "He
found the photos helpful in livestock judging to show examples
of conformation, both good and bad," according to grandson
John Allen, who grew up shadowing his grandfather and father
Chester, a photographer and writer, and today operates the
family photography business, J. C. Allen & Son, Inc.
J. C.'s arrival at Purdue coincided with a period of rapid growth
for the fledgling College of Agriculture. Between 1908 and 1919, the
University would complete eight major agricultural buildings and expand
its experimental farms. By 1915, teaching, research and Extension had
made agricultural operations the largest unit of the University. Among
J. C.'s early contemporaries were George Christie, the first superintendent
of agricultural Extension, Lella Gaddis, the first state leader of home
demonstration work, and, later, David Pfendler, agriculture counselor
and administrator, and Earl Butz, professor and dean of agriculture.
Moments in time
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