Ramsey County History – Winter 1993: “Henry Bosse’s Priceless Photographs and the Mississippi’s Passage into the Age of Industry”

Henry Bosse’s Priceless Photographs and the Mississippi’s Passage into the Age of Industry

Author: John O. Anfinson

In 1989 the author, then historian for the Army Corps of Engineers in St. Paul, received a call about an album of oval, blue-tinted photographs of the Upper Mississippi. This call brought to light the existence of 169 exquisite images, left for 50 years on a Corps’ dredge, of the Mississippi in transition from a natural river to one decisively shaped by the human hand. This article tells the story of those photographs and that transition.

PDF of Anfinson article