The Portraiture of William Bullard: Photographing a Community of Colour
Updated: Oct 6
Frank Morrill had owned the box of glass negatives for years before he had any real idea what he was looking at. He'd bought them from a collector in 2003, part of a much bigger haul of old central Massachusetts photography, and they'd mostly sat untouched ever since. Then one afternoon, while his ten year old granddaughter Hannah was helping him on an unrelated project, she picked up a small plate and asked a simple question.
"What is this a negative of?"
That question sent Morrill back through the whole collection properly, and it eventually led him to realise he was holding more than two hundred portraits of Black and Native American families in early 1900s Worcester, taken by a self-taught local photographer almost nobody had ever reckoned with. His name was William Bullard, and for two decades he did something hardly anyone else in his position was doing: he photographed his Black and Nipmuc neighbours with the same formal care and dignity white Americans expected for themselves.
Quick answers
● Who was William Bullard? A self-taught photographer with no studio, from Worcester, Massachusetts, who lived from 1876 to 1918. Between 1897 and 1917 he took more than two hundred portraits of his Black and Native American (mostly Nipmuc) neighbours in the city's Beaver Brook district.
● How many photos did he take in total? Around 5,400 glass plate negatives survive across his whole career, covering streetscapes, businesses and trains as well as portraits. The portraits of people of colour that make up this collection are a subset of that, upwards of two hundred plates.
● Why did he photograph this community? No document in his own words survives to explain it. Historians who've researched him closely argue it came down to living in the neighbourhood himself and needing paying customers, not a stated belief system, though his technical choices still gave Black sitters a dignity many contemporary photographers denied them.
● Where are the photographs now? As of the most recent reporting available, collector Frank Morrill still personally owns the original negatives and the photographer's logbook. Around eighty prints were exhibited at the Worcester Art Museum in 2017 and 2018 and published in an award-winning book.
Who was William Bullard
Before any of that rediscovery, there's the man himself, and what's actually known about him doesn't amount to much. William S. Bullard was born in Worcester in 1876, the second of six brothers, though early researchers assumed he was the eldest until genealogists traced an older brother, George, who died in infancy that same year. His parents were Charles and Ellen Bullard, and the family lived on Mayfield Street, since renamed Maple Tree Lane, in the same Beaver Brook neighbourhood where most of his eventual subjects lived too. He never married.
Every reliable account of Bullard describes him as self-taught. There's no record of him apprenticing under an established photographer, and no studio ever carried his name. He worked instead with a large format wood and bellows camera that needed exposures lasting several minutes, travelling to people's homes by bicycle, trolley, train and even horse-drawn wagon, and selling prints for as little as twenty five cents each. For at least one year, the 1901 Worcester city directory, he formally listed his own occupation as photographer, though what he did for a living the rest of the time isn't clearly documented anywhere.
Beaver Brook: the neighbourhood he photographed
Beaver Brook, sometimes called the Laurel Clayton Street district, sat on Worcester's west side and covered roughly a square mile, according to a 1911 neighbourhood map later drawn up by Clark University researchers. It was a mixed, working class area that had drawn Black families north since the mid 1800s, including formerly enslaved people who arrived after the Civil War from Virginia, North Carolina and South Carolina, alongside Nipmuc families and some Canadian immigrants.
Most residents worked as coachmen, domestic servants, laundresses, day labourers, teamsters, hostlers, barbers and musicians, and the area supported at least one Black cycling club, the Albion Cycling Club, in a neighbourhood that also happened to sit near a cluster of bicycle manufacturers. John Street Baptist Church, founded there and still an active Black congregation today, marked its 140th anniversary in 2024, one of the only physical threads still tying the modern neighbourhood back to the one Bullard once photographed.
A neighbour with a camera, not a photographer with an agenda
What actually set Bullard apart wasn't his equipment or training, since he had neither in any formal sense. It was a specific technical choice. Many white photographers of the era lightened or otherwise altered how Black skin appeared in a print, chasing a look built entirely around white subjects. Nancy Kathryn Burns, the Worcester Art Museum curator who helped bring this collection back into public view, has argued that Bullard's photographs show "he understood how to take pictures of black people as black people", without leaning on those retouching habits, giving his sitters the same formal weight and detail a paying white customer would expect from any professional studio of the day. That choice is the whole reason this collection gets treated as remarkable rather than just old. It's also easy to read too much intention into it.
Why did he really do it
It's tempting to read Bullard as a lone crusader for racial equality decades ahead of his time, and versions of that story have circulated online. There's a problem with it, though: nobody has ever found a diary entry, letter, interview or notebook in which Bullard explains his own reasons for photographing his Black and Nipmuc neighbours. The scholars who spent years researching him are explicit that they're not making him out to be some kind of committed abolitionist figure. What the evidence actually supports is something more grounded: he lived in Beaver Brook himself, needed paying customers, and had the technical skill and apparently the trust of families who'd been mistreated or ignored by plenty of other white Worcester residents. Whatever his private views were, they didn't survive him in his own words.
The people behind the plates
For decades the negatives were just images of strangers. That's changed almost entirely thanks to a research project run out of Clark University, and it's turned up individual stories worth telling on their own.
Edward and Celia Perkins were both born into slavery in Camden, South Carolina, Edward in 1833 and Celia in 1858. Edward briefly owned land there after the Civil War before losing it by 1880, and the couple later settled in Worcester, where Edward worked as a truckman and Celia as a washerwoman. It was Celia's portrait that Frank Morrill's granddaughter Hannah picked up and asked about, the single negative that restarted the whole project decades later.
James Harold Ward, a jazz drummer nicknamed Boot, died at 32, leaving behind a seven year old son, James Harold Bud Ward Jr. Bud went on to attend North High School, serve in the segregated wartime US Navy, graduate from Cornell and eventually become the first Black senior vice president and corporate officer at a major hotel chain, helping develop the Courtyard by Marriott brand during nearly two decades there. His own son, Sterling Ward, later traced the family back further still, to two people sold into slavery from present day Nigeria and Guinea, Minger Brimage and Maria Gatling, whose descendants eventually settled in Worcester after the Civil War.
Solomon Pierce was named for his grandfather, who enlisted in the Massachusetts 54th, the famous Black Civil War regiment, at forty two, making him the oldest man in the unit. One of Solomon's uncles served alongside his own father in that same regiment and was killed in its assault on Fort Wagner. Reuben Griffin, photographed in four separate uniformed poses, was a Spanish American War veteran who later worked as a janitor at Worcester Trade School. Raymond Schuyler worked as a railroad gatekeeper and was reportedly the oldest surviving member of Worcester's NAACP chapter when he died in 1956. None of this was known when the negatives were still just numbers in a box.
How Bullard's own story ended
The families he photographed mostly went on to build something, careers, congregations, grandchildren who'd eventually go looking for them. Bullard himself didn't get that far. His own life didn't end well. He died in 1918, not long after his mother Ellen died, and multiple sources describe his death as suicide. He was buried beside her at Putnam Heights Cemetery in Putnam, Connecticut. He left no explanation of his own for why he'd spent two decades photographing a community much of Worcester either ignored or actively excluded, and by the time he died, nobody outside that community seems to have thought his work worth preserving in any organised way.
A community, and a photographer, nearly lost for good
That's more or less what happened next, for the better part of a century. Bullard's roughly 5,400 total glass negatives, covering streetscapes, businesses, trains and portraits across central Massachusetts, passed through private hands until Frank Morrill, a retired teacher and longtime local historian, bought a large batch from a collector in 2003. The two hundred plus portraits of Black and Nipmuc sitters sat mostly unexamined among them for years, since without any way to identify who was in them, Morrill has said they risked becoming a dead end for research.
Two strokes of luck changed that. First, Hannah's question about Celia Perkins's portrait sent Morrill back through the collection properly. Second, in an entirely separate conversation years earlier, the same man he'd bought the negatives from had mentioned he'd recently found the photographer's own logbook and asked if Morrill wanted that too. That logbook recorded names, addresses and sometimes what a sitter had paid, matched to tiny scratched numbers on each negative, and it became the key that made identifying anyone in the collection possible at all.
Rebuilding two hundred lives, name by name
From there, the project moved properly to Clark University. Historian Janette Greenwood, author of an earlier book on Black migration to Worcester after the Civil War, led a public history seminar built specifically around identifying Bullard's sitters, working alongside Nancy Kathryn Burns at the Worcester Art Museum. Students combed census records, city directories, land deeds, cemetery records and newspaper archives, and the team built a community advisory board that included descendants themselves, tracking some sitters down to living relatives willing to talk. Roughly three quarters to four fifths of the portrait subjects have now been identified by name, an unusual outcome for photographs of Black Americans from this period, when subjects were far more often left anonymous even in official archives.
A neighbourhood demolished twice
Beaver Brook lost its history once already, when Bullard's negatives sat unidentified and mostly ignored in private hands for the better part of a century. The second loss was physical, and it's permanent. The Beaver Brook of Bullard's photographs doesn't really exist any more, and not because of slow, ordinary change.
Frank Morrill has described how local industrial employers, among them Harrington and Richardson Arms and Coppus Engineering, bought up more than forty homes in the neighbourhood during the 1950s and early 1960s intending to expand their own operations. "That was an easy target in the fifties and early sixties, and it's a shame", he's said, describing how the companies tore the houses down and then never built anything in their place, leaving much of the area vacant and fenced off to this day. John Street Baptist Church, marking its 140th anniversary in 2024, is one of the few threads still tying the modern neighbourhood back to the one Bullard once walked through with his camera.
Where the story stands today
Roughly eighty of the portraits were exhibited at the Worcester Art Museum between October 2017 and February 2018 under the title Rediscovering an American Community of Color, and the accompanying book by Burns, Greenwood and Morrill won the 2018 Historic New England Book Prize. As of the most recent reporting available, Morrill still personally owns the original negatives and logbook. Descendants of several sitters, including Bud Ward's own family, have since been reunited with portraits of relatives they'd never seen. A ten year old asking what a scrap of glass showed is most of the reason any of that was possible, and it's worth sitting with how easily it might never have happened at all.
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Bullard wasn't the only photographer using a camera to push back against how his era saw race. John Howard Griffin: The Journalist Who Lived Life on Both Sides of the Colour Line looks at a white writer who deliberately changed his own skin to document segregation from the inside, decades after Bullard's death.
Around the same era, another self-taught American photographer was building his own long-term record of a community outsiders rarely looked at closely. Karl (Carl) Moon and the Pueblo Native North Americans Portraits covers his own portrait work among Native American communities in the American West.
For a later take on ordinary people photographed on their own terms, The Bus That Captured Britain: Daniel Meadows' 1973 Portrait Road Trip follows a young photographer who drove a double decker bus around Britain doing much the same thing Bullard did on foot in Worcester.
Sources
14. Clark University News, "Greenwood's 'Rediscovering an American Community of Color' earns book prize"
