A man with suspenders and patched dungarees squints at the camera, inscrutable. He holds a rope, the tether of an equally enigmatic dapple gray horse, whose bright flank outshines the deep tones of the photograph. One of them may be named “George.”
That’s one of 32 images on view in the exhibition “Oren W. Hills, Photographer” at the Vermont History Museum in Montpelier. Hills was born in the Capital City in 1891, according to the exhibition text, and worked as a professional photographer in many capacities, shooting everything from school yearbooks to crime scenes. In World War I, he served in the U.S. Army as an aerial photographer. When he died in 1975, he left a large trove of his images to the Vermont Historical Society.
As is often the case with such gifts, there isn’t a lot of information to go with them, beyond notes written on the edges of the negatives. Though the historical society did put out a call to anyone who knew the photos’ subjects or locations, director of collections and access Amanda Gustin said, “sometimes trying to ID an old photograph is very needle-in-a-haystack.”
No titles or wall labels accompany the photos on display. They are undated, except for one of a 1907 high school basketball team, but all are from the earliest part of Hills’ career, from around 1911 to the First World War.
Despite that lack of context, the images are beautifully detailed. Because they’re reproduced from original glass-plate negatives — an earlier technology that’s in some ways better than the film that followed it — a viewer can see expressions, textures and nuance more clearly than in a photo from a decade later.
That clarity allows Hills’ subjects to show us who they are, despite the passage of more than a century. A school photo from Cabot presents rows of children who must’ve been sitting too long — only one of them is smiling. One girl is on the verge of tears, as others cross their arms and glare daggers at the photographer.
Hills’ studio portraits offer glimpses of Montpelier society. “JB Snell” stands casually in front of a pastoral backdrop, hands in his pockets, showing off a splotched white cowhide vest and a luxuriant black fur coat. He’s got a fashionable top hat and a cigar in his teeth; his mustache would be the envy of the 1970s.
Conversely, “Alice Smith” looks extremely out of place in a delicate but ill-fitting lace dress and tight pearl choker. Square-jawed with gray eyes, she resembles anyone you’d run into at today’s Capital City Farmers Market — she just needs to change into a polar fleece.
Other photos document 1910s central Vermont life while provoking questions about it. One image of what appears to be a meeting shows many men, most with extravagant facial hair, surrounding a small table where an important few are writing; one of those figures, smartly clad in a suit and tie, is a woman.
One group portrait shows rows of workers at their jobsite, cut logs in the background. Many have sun hats, and some have aprons; they’re covered in mud, and the first row is mostly barefoot. Unlike with their granite-quarrying and sugar-making companions in other photos, it’s hard to know what this company is doing.
The past may be, as L.P. Hartley wrote, a foreign country, but looking at Hills’ pictures makes a viewer deeply aware of small similarities. Displaying the photos in Montpelier, where many were shot, creates a sense of kinship with their subjects. One busy scene shows young and old residents parking horses and wagons outside a clapboard building with a clearly lettered sign: These people are definitely excited to finally have a post office.
The original print version of this article was headlined “Oren Hills’ Historic Photos of Central Vermont Tie Past to Present”
This article appears in The Money & Retirement Issue 2025.
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