A photograph long described as one of the earliest ever made in Arkansas may not have been taken in Arkansas at all.
The image shows a collection of log buildings, fences, and cleared ground beneath wooded hills. A large leafless tree stands in the foreground. The photograph is preserved in an elaborate gold-colored mat and case.
It has been identified as the original Dwight Mission near Russellville, Arkansas, supposedly photographed around 1845 by the painter and early photographer John Mix Stanley.
That identification would make the image historically significant. Photography had reached Arkansas only a few years earlier, and an outdoor view from 1845 would be exceptionally early.
One substantial problem remains: the evidence points to the other Dwight Mission—the one established in the Cherokee Nation in what is now Oklahoma.
Two places called Dwight Mission
The original Dwight Mission was established in 1820 on Illinois Bayou, several miles west of present-day Russellville. Missionaries opened its school for Western Cherokee children on January 1, 1822.
It became a sizable settlement. By the time it closed, the grounds included residences, school buildings, workshops, barns, and other structures.
The Cherokee ceded their Arkansas land in the Treaty of 1828. The mission closed in 1829, and its personnel moved west with the Cherokee people.
A new Dwight Mission was then constructed along Sallisaw Creek in the Cherokee Nation, near present-day Marble City, Oklahoma. Its school opened in 1830.
That distinction is crucial. By 1843, the Arkansas mission had been abandoned for approximately fourteen years. The Oklahoma mission remained an active school with maintained buildings, fences, cultivated land, employees, and pupils.
Although the Arkansas mission closed in 1829, its property was not necessarily deserted. At least one early session of the Pope County quorum court was held at Old Dwight, and some of the mission buildings were later sold and removed. Consequently, the maintained appearance of the photographed compound cannot by itself distinguish Arkansas from Oklahoma. The Oklahoma identification must rest primarily on the photograph’s institutional history and specialist attribution, not on the apparent condition of the buildings.
What the Oklahoma Historical Society says
The Oklahoma Historical Society possesses the cased image. Its catalog identifies the scene as Dwight Mission on Sallisaw Creek in present-day Sequoyah County, Oklahoma.
The catalog dates it to April 1843 and assigns it local control number 697.
That is not merely a modern geographical guess. In their 2005 reference work, Pioneer Photographers from the Mississippi to the Continental Divide, photographic historians Peter E. Palmquist and Thomas R. Kailbourn discussed this exact image and OHS number.
They identified the scene as the Oklahoma Dwight Mission and reported that the original exposure was made sometime between the last week of April and the first week of May 1843.
They also directly addressed the Arkansas identification, describing it as incorrect.
Their information came from Chester Cowen of the Oklahoma Historical Society. Unfortunately, the published catalog does not reveal the original donor, the complete chain of custody, or the evidence behind that unusually narrow date range.
The Oklahoma identification is nevertheless much better documented than the Arkansas one.
How the Arkansas identification developed
Tracing the Arkansas claim produced the most revealing part of the research.
The image has been attributed to Cephas Washburn’s Reminiscences of the Indians. Washburn helped establish the original Arkansas mission and later served at the new mission in the Cherokee Nation.
His book was published posthumously in 1869.
I examined the original 1869 edition. It contains no photograph of Dwight Mission. In fact, it contains no photographic illustrations.
The disputed picture did not enter Washburn’s book until editor Hugh Park produced an illustrated reprint in 1955.
Park placed the photograph near the end of the book and described it as what was “believed” to be the oldest photographic print of Old Dwight Mission in Arkansas. He thanked Dwight Presbyterian Mission, Inc., of Tulsa, Oklahoma, for allowing him to use it. He also acknowledged Oscar E. Payne of Tulsa for helping him obtain the picture.
The 1955 book provided no photographer, date, ownership history, or explanation of how the buildings were identified. Its wording showed that the identification was tentative.
Decades later, Arkansas Made: A Survey of the Decorative, Mechanical, and Fine Arts Produced in Arkansas reproduced the same image. Its caption called it a circa 1845 daguerreotype of the Dwight Cherokee Mission near Russellville and attributed it to John Mix Stanley.
The source listed in that caption was Washburn’s Reminiscences—meaning the 1955 illustrated reprint, not Washburn’s original 1869 book.
A tentative statement from 1955 had gradually become an asserted fact in Arkansas.
Could Stanley have taken it?
John Mix Stanley and Caleb Sumner Dickerman are plausible candidates, but neither has been proved to be the photographer.
They were working around Fort Gibson and Van Buren in 1843 and were taking daguerreotypes in the Cherokee Nation by June.
An intriguing contemporary clue also emerges. On April 8 and 15, 1843, merchant Lorenzo Delano advertised a complete daguerreotype apparatus for sale at Park Hill in the Cherokee Nation. The equipment included plates, cases, and everything needed to take likenesses.
That advertisement appeared shortly before the Oklahoma Historical Society’s reported date for the Dwight Mission image.
Someone in the area therefore had the necessary camera and materials. We do not know who purchased the apparatus—or whether Stanley, Dickerman, or someone else used it at Dwight.
The photographer should remain listed as unknown unless a letter, diary, receipt, or newspaper account is discovered.
Is the object really an 1843 daguerreotype?
Another uncertainty involves the photographic process itself.
The Oklahoma Historical Society describes the cased object as a daguerreotype. Palmquist and Kailbourn, however, identified it as a ferrotype—or tintype—copy of a quarter-plate daguerreotype.
That distinction matters because tintypes did not appear until the 1850s. If the specialists were correct, the plate now in the case is a later copy of a lost or unidentified 1843 original.
A digital scan cannot settle that question. A conservator would need to examine the physical plate and determine whether the image rests on silvered copper, as a daguerreotype would, or on an iron sheet characteristic of a tintype.
The decorative gold-colored surround proves nothing about the photographic process.
The most defensible conclusion
Based on the available evidence, I would identify the image this way:
Dwight Mission on Sallisaw Creek in the Cherokee Nation, in present-day Oklahoma. The underlying photograph was reportedly made in late April or early May 1843. The photographer is unknown. The surviving cased image may be a later tintype copy of an original daguerreotype.
I place the probability that the scene is the Oklahoma mission at approximately 90 percent.
The exact 1843 date is less certain, and the attribution to John Mix Stanley remains speculation.
The Arkansas identification appears to have resulted from a reasonable but mistaken assumption made for a 1955 book. Later publications repeated and strengthened that assumption without establishing its provenance.
This is how historical errors become accepted facts. A cautious caption loses the words “believed to be.” A possible date becomes a definite date. A plausible photographer becomes the photographer.
Then, seventy years later, somebody finally follows the footnotes backward.
Odds & Ends 024
I researched the material in this post using ChatGPT over several hours
