The Exeter Remembered exhibit was originally created in 1980 with funding from the N.H. Council for the Humanities, to acquaint the citizens of Exeter and New Hampshire with the way we were at the turn of the century. The prints gathered together in this exhibition represent the best of over four thousand glass plate negatives uncovered at the Exeter Historical Society and the Phillips Exeter Academy. These fragile images, the personal work of Albert C. Buzell, Edwin L. Cunningham and his son Edward W. Cunningham, constitute an invaluable social documentary of small town life in New England during the early 1900s.

At the time this exhibit was created, the history of the town at the turn of the century was a forgotten chapter in Exeter's past. There were no complete accounts of the period between 1890 and 1917. The photographs initiated an oral history dialogue with the community and they continue to do so today. Members of the town are explicitly invited to contribute factual information or personal recollections while visiting the display. Though all the photographs were taken in the Exeter area, a number of the locations and individuals portrayed remain unidentified. Our goal has always been to gain public participation in a continuous effort to recover an essential part of our unrecorded past.

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About the Photographers

Albert C. Buzzell

Albert C. Buzell was born in 1844 in Northwood, New Hampshire. His father, S. Clark Buzell, was a successful businessman and, treasurer of Phillips Exeter Academy from 1862 to 1880. In 1861 Albert Buzell graduated from the Academy and then proceeded to enroll in Harvard University, and subsequently the Harvard Law School. After completing his legal training in 1868 he practiced law in Boston for a few years before he opened an office in Exeter.

Buzell never married, but possessed of ample means he devoted himself largely in the pursuit of his hobbies: reading, playing music, and practicing the new popular art of photography. The resulting images indicate Buzell's interest in recording the local surroundings that he observed in his daily walks around town. By the time of his death in 1910, Buzell had become an accomplished photographer as evidenced in the large number of plates given to the Exeter Historical Society.

Edwin L. & Edward W. Cunningham

Edwin L. Cunningham was a professional photographer working for Chickering's Studio in Boston prior to 1900. Though little is known of Cunningham's origins or early years, he arrived in Exeter in 1904 as the official photographer of Phillips Exeter Academy. Dr. Amen, then the Principal of the Academy, was anxious to stop the practice of having to send the Academy students to Boston to have their pictures taken.

In 1905 Cunningham opened a formal studio at 121 Water Street. The Cunningham Studio remained a going concern with the support of Edwin's son, Edward, until 1954. Prior to World War I few students possessed cameras and the Cunningham Studio furnished pictures for all major campus publications and recorded every significant event. A subsequent display of Cunningham's photographs of the Academy won a major award at the World's Fair in Buffalo, New York in 1928. Cunningham also built a thriving local clientele and his glass plates, depicting both town and gown, represents one of the largest private collections in New England.

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