Earliest Photograph of Register Full of Detail

The Register Building
Photo Courtesy Historic Mobile Preservation Society

Enlarged Balcony Section

Enlarged Sidewalk Section

This photo of the Mobile Register building at the southwest corner of Royal and St. Michael streets is probably the earliest image of the newspaper and is full of interesting detail. What’s most interesting, though, are the things that aren’t known about the photo.

The Mobile Register bought the building in 1872 and remained there until 1932. The building is believed to have been constructed in 1804, and that the city entertained the Marquis de Lafayette there on his visit to Mobile in 1825.

During its ownership by William R. Hallett in 1830s, the building was known as the Lafayette Hotel. In 1861, the title passed to Caroline Roper who changed the name of the building to the Roper House. The building continued as a hotel until purchased by the Mobile Register in July 1872.

Before the newspaper moved into the building, workmen gutted the building and then braced it with iron beams and pillars. On the first floor, accountants occupied the front rooms and the printing presses the rear. On the second floor were the offices of the publisher and editorial staff. Compositors, who sat at type cases 20 hours a day in shifts, occupied the entire third floor, one great room facing Royal Street. The news and telegraph room occupied a third-floor wing. The paper’s Agricultural Department worked in small rooms under the roof dormers.

A fire in January 1876 destroyed most of the block in which the Register was located. The Register and the Bank of Mobile were the only two buildings left standing in the block. The south wall of the Register cracked and buckled in the fire, leaving the newspaper with about $32,500 in damages. The Register removed the iron work and remodeled the exterior before 1920.

We don’t know who the photographer was, when the photo was taken, or what kind of photo process the cameraman used. The answers to those questions would help explain why the photo was taken and who the people in the photo are.

The photo appears to have been staged by the photographer. All of the men on the second-floor balcony, except for the man on the right with his back to the camera, are looking directly at the camera. They were aware that they were being photographed. The man with his back turned seems to be deliberately ignoring the camera, another indication the men knew they were being photographed. Also, if they had not remained still, their images would have been blurred like that of some of the men on the first floor. So they had been told to hold still.

Because the Register’s publisher, editors, and newsmen worked from offices on the second floor of the building, these men are probably the paper’s news managers. Of the seven men on the balcony all but two are wearing top hats.

The men outside the first floor of the building also are posing and looking at the camera. They may have worked in the accounting rooms behind them. The photo isn’t sharp enough to clearly make out the hat types. There seems to be a variety of styles, Cahill, low John Bull, and perhaps low derbies.

The workman with the wheeled dolly appears to be dropping off fresh packages of blank newsprint sheets for the presses. But it’s not clear why he’d stack them on the sidewalk rather than take them into the building. The Register probably also did job printing on smaller presses and these packages may have been for that service.

If those packages on the sidewalk are blank newsprint sheets, then that would indicate the Register was still using it double-cylinder, sheet-fed Hoe steam press. In December 1888, the Register installed a $10,000 Goss web-perfecting press. This press used rolls of newsprint rather than sheets and could print 20,000 four-page newspapers an hour. Newsprint sheets indicate the photo was made before December 1888.

The Register installed incandescent light bulbs in the building in February 1884. The paper had quickly converted to electric lights because the old gas lights were often blown out by a breeze from the open windows. The windows had to be kept open because more than 80 gas burners illuminated the building’s rooms, creating a great deal of heat and smoke.

The Register ran more than a mile of wire through the building, suspended a light bulb above each work area, installed its own eight-horsepower engine to run a dynamo and at 6 o’clock each night turned on the engine to light the building.

It’s impossible to tell whether the electric lights had been installed in this photo. The windows on the third floor, where the composition room was located, are closed, as are all the windows in the building except for one in the center of the second floor. The men may have climbed out on the balcony from that window. The closed windows may be an indication this photo was taken after 1884. Certainly, there are no power lines from outside going into the building, so this would be before there was a central power plant and poles carrying electric wires in Mobile.

In all likelihood, then, this photo was taken between 1884 and 1888.