Mary Harrod Northend (1850–1926)

Mary Harrod Northend was born in Salem, Massachusetts. Her father William Dummer Northend was a lawyer and a state senator, and the author of a history of Massachusetts. Mary did not begin writing until she was in her fifties, and then published short historical sketches in newspapers, illustrating them with photographs she took with her own camera. Later she hired a professional photographer accompany her on field trips all over New England. She published photos in books and periodicals under her own name, and ran a successful business selling images to editors, architects, decorators, and historians. By 1915, she had published her work in 37 periodicals, including the Boston Herald, Ladies' Home Journal, The Century Magazine, and published the first two of her more than one dozen books. She became a noted authority on colonial architecture, antiques, and landscape.
In her work, Mary took a lively interest in the ways Americans coped with the enormous changes that occurred from her birth before the Civil War to the late 1920s. She left a collection of reportedly more than 30,000 pictures when she died.
The nonprofit organization Historic New England (formerly the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities) collected over 6,000 glass plate negatives and several thousand prints of Mary's photos.
In 2014, her work was included with that of Alice Austin, Edith Guerrier, Ethel Reed, Sara Galner, and Edith Brown in an exhibit at the Boston University Art Gallery.