In 1995, I moved to Nashville, Tennessee to work for the summer. At the time, I was an American Studies graduate student at Notre Dame and was concerned with experiencing different cultural regions to expand my understanding of American life; this brought me to Music City. Though working during the week, I got in my Mercury Topaz on weekends to explore other parts of Tennessee and southern Kentucky. One such journey brought me to the Historic Rugby settlement in the Cumberland plateau area of northeast Tennessee.

Earlier that year, I researched Thomas Hughes’s Rugby colony for a paper and wanted to visit this strange, failed utopian settlement of British aristocracy in America. The visit to Rugby also cemented my desire to build a career in public history, because I saw how good history must be applied in site interpretation. A disconnect between the interpretation of the historic site differed from the story I knew from my research. At that point, I knew I wanted to be involved with constructing historic site/exhibit interpretation at some point in my career. The site interpreters used an idyllic tone while discussing the story of Rugby and touted the brotherhood between the British settlers and Americans. Such a tone was represented at Historic Rugby in how specific homes were dressed, such as Newberry House’s British and American flags hanging side by side in harmony. While Thomas Hughes had many allies in northern intellectual circles, neither he nor his Rugbeians successfully reached out to their American neighbors in northeast Tennessee.

The photograph I restored was of Newberry House, one of the remaining residences in Historic Rugby. As seen in class earlier this semester, my photography skills were not stellar in 1995. When attempting to capture Newberry House’s essence, my finger somehow found itself in front of the lens. After scanning it, I knew major work was required to see the entire house in the photo.

The work began when I tried channel mixing to wash out the red-orange tone of my finger to no avail. Luckily this home was symmetric in design, so I used features from the left side and copied them, rotated them on a separate document, and then pasted them to the right such as the posts, fence pickets, windows, and flags. I created pattern stamps of grass and wood siding to fill in discolored areas. I also patched areas of greenery on both sides of the house to maintain texture and light. Due to the shadows, I also lassoed portions of the photo to adjust for contrast and levels. Finally, I sponged the curtains, trees, and grass to brighten the colors. The photo is not an award-winner, but I was able to correct it for many of its flaws to see all of Newberry House illustrating the British-American connection at Rugby.

For the next segment of the assignment I abstracted, colored, and vignetted an image from Harper’s Weekly because the magazine printed two articles on Rugby in 1880, which included a few good engravings.1 The engravings in Harper’s represented a romantic view of Rugby, particularly the portion I cropped of women picking fruit from the bushes surrounding their English garden. After saving the scanned Harper’s page, I opened it in Photoshop to begin cropping. I identified the portion of the engraving I wanted to highlight—the women. I cropped it from the original scan. From there, I auto-corrected for color and contrast, and proceeded to enrich the blacks and neutrals in the Selective Color menu.  After setting my layers, I tried blending out the background with the layer Blending Options. This did not work as well as I hoped. Instead, I background erased most of the cropped image to extract the engraving of the two women using different size erasers. I also used the paint brush in white to eliminate extraneous black speckles that I could not erase.

Once I extracted the engraving, I began to hand color the women and their baskets. To do this, I consulted Godey’s Lady’s Book to get an idea of possible dress colors for this 1880 engraving.  Finding on-line editions of Godey’s from the 1880s was more challenging than I thought, but I found a suitable example from October 1883, pictured in the plate on the left from Katherine's Dress Site. While certainly not perfect, this gave me a good idea on how to color the Rugby women (who would have been proud to be ahead of their time in fashion).

I color sampled the Godey’s image to get a close match of colors. Then, using the magnetic lasso, lasso, paint brush, and overlay blending options I colored the images. The colors were not as dark on my engraving as I hoped, but using overlay and fill layers necessitated a lighter color in order for the outlines of the engraving to show through.

Following the method outlined in Photoshop Restoration and Retouching, I vignetted the images of the women. Since the background was already white, I decided to fill the inverse with a brown color that I will incorporate into the design of my overall site. By vignetting this image, the women are highlighted in a soft, sentimental light.

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