The main object of this quest first appeared to me in the form of a silvery-white image on a nineteenth-century glass plate negative. At the time I was in the process of assembling early photographs of the New England landscape for a book project and had heard that there were some old wooden boxes containing glass plate negatives stored in the attic of an estate in Lincoln, owned by the Massachusetts Audubon Society. Leads of this sort sometimes unearth rich reserves, so I made arrangements to have a look.

The property in Lincoln was originally owned by a family named Gordon who had come into money in the late nineteenth century, and, along with other Boston families of means, began moving out from the city in the early 1900s, primarily, I believe, to escape the influx of Italians and Irish who were then moving uncomfortably close to some of the enclaves of Bostonians of the proper sort. The house was a vast Georgian-style building with a wide central foyer floor laid in ancient Cambrian sedimentary stone, still embedded with the curled fossils of trilobites and crinoids. The attic stretched the full length of the building and was ill lit by two mullioned eyebrow windows on the gable ends and a single naked bulb that looked as if it had not been changed since the 1940s.

One of the characteristics of the Boston Brahmin class, who were the founders of the Massachusetts Audubon Society, was a reluctance to throw anything away. Here, lining the eaves and positioned so as to form a veritable labyrinth of corridors and passageways, lay the evidence of this custom—row upon row of shelves and filmed-over glass cabinets containing phalanxes of stuffed birds with moth-eaten, patchy feathers and glazed, dusty eyes. Piled on the floor were chairs constructed from sticks and twigs, with frayed rattan seats, stacks of old books, cartons of bulletins of extinct natural history organizations, framed bird and mammal prints, old manual typewriters, a brass microscope, and oaken filing cabinets containing the minutes from society meetings held back in the 1950s.

As I worked through the clutter, just to the north of the west-facing eyebrow window, I spotted a row of long narrow boxes lurking in the shadows, like the caskets in some ancient sepulcher. Inside the boxes, stacked vertically, some still wrapped in the glassine envelopes in which they had been packed, were twenty glass plate photographic negatives.

I drew out one of the plates and held it up to the window. There, gleaming in the dull light, was the ghostly image of a house and garden, complete with what appeared to be full blossoming hydrangeas and a little dog, all in silvery reverse. I selected another plate, and then another, and then moved on to inspect another box. My pulse quickened as I worked. An acquaintance of mine had just discovered over three hundred glass plate negatives of Civil War regiments under similar circumstances and I thought I was onto something.

In the end, I uncovered more than two thousand photographic plates, most of them taken between 1888 and 1917 and credited, as I later learned, to William Brewster, who was, among other things, the first president of the Massachusetts Audubon Society, which had been founded in 1896 by two socially prominent women who had become outraged by the slaughter of innocent birds for the frivolous purpose of adorning women’s hats.

After some negotiation, I gained permission to borrow a few of the plates, and one rainy autumn afternoon printed them to see what they were all about. I laid the first negative on a sheet of photographic paper, flashed the plate briefly with the enlarger, and then placed the paper in the development bath.

For those who do their own darkroom work there is a certain, almost mystical tension in the moment when a new positive image first swims into view. This sense of anticipation is all the more powerful when you are working with historic glass plates from an age long past and created by some anonymous individual long since dead and buried. You feel like an archeologist breaking into the sealed tomb of a lost culture in a distant country, except that there is something more animated about a photograph. As you watch, an actual slice of past life slowly sharpens into reality from the pale nothingness of the light-sensitive photographic paper—landscapes, hills, skies, buildings, dogs, people, the decisive moment, forever stalled in the flux of time.

As I watched, alone in the dull red light of the darkroom, a moment from the late nineteenth century slowly ghosted up into the twentieth century. The image showed a group of men and women dressed in tweeds and tam-o’-shanters, posing beside canoes pulled up on a reedy riverbank on a late summer day in 1898. I printed a few more. There were views of landscapes, pictures of the nests of birds, gardens, full-skirted women in flowering hats standing in the forest with bouquets of wildflowers, wooded roads, the wilder shores of rivers, and quiet, tree-lined Cambridge streets. There was no order to the photos in the boxes, only a few indications of dates and places on some of the plates, but otherwise no identifications—only images, arrested time, a kinetic moment from an unidentified past, temporarily stopped and stored as potential energy, waiting to be liberated.

In those photographs that showed groups of people, I was interested to see from time to time a handsome, white-bearded man with a quizzical, aristocratic look who I later learned was Mr. William Brewster himself. But I was especially interested in one particular plate. The negative image suggested a portrait of a group of people standing and sitting in front of a lean-to structure somewhere deep in the woods. Most of the faces of the figures in the negative were dark black, except for their shining eyes. But there was an image of a smaller man there, who, in contrast to the others, stood out in a bright silvery white. I didn’t quite understand why he shone forth with such an angelic glow until I printed the negative and studied it.

The positive print showed a group of well-attired white people. But standing slightly off to the side of the group, in front of one of the cedar posts, was a small, handsome black man. He was younger than the others, but he stood with them, as if he were a member of the party. He was not wearing the apron or work clothes of a servant but, like the others, was dressed properly in a dark suit, white shirt, and a black tie. Furthermore he appeared comfortable with his surroundings; he stares out at the photographer with large, serious eyes and a no-nonsense, almost cynical look, a certain assuredness in spite of his youth and the fact that he is the only black among a company of whites somewhere in the wilds of Maine or the Adirondacks.

My discovery of these plates occurred in the autumn of a uniquely rainy year that somehow seemed to match the sepia tones and grays of the plates and prints I was working with. Photo researchers that year seemed to be having good luck. One had found a collection of plates taken in the late nineteenth century around Cummington, Massachusetts, by two local photographers who had documented the region and the people around their community. A huge collection of some 7,000 turn-of-the-century plates by the Concord photographer Herbert Gleason had recently been assembled. A tireless photo hunter in rural Maine had discovered a new batch of glass plates by the marine photographer Nathaniel Stebbins, and, along with the Brewster plates, I myself had discovered a variety of negatives and prints taken in the Swift River Valley towns in central Massachusetts in the early 1900s. These latter were particularly poignant. The subjects were long dead, of course, but more to the point, by 1939 the whole valley, virtually all the meadows, woodlands, farmhouses, graveyards, and in fact the sites of five whole towns, lay beneath the waters of the Quabbin Reservoir that now supplies drinking water for Boston.

Partly because of my work and partly because of the constant rain, I went around that year with a somber nineteenth-century sort of mood. In a sense I took up residence in the world of sepia photographs. Wherever I went in New England I found myself hunting out those lost landscapes I knew from old photographs—isolated arched stone bridges, hayfields, old woodlands with massive hemlocks, mountain roads in the Berkshires, and mirror-still lakes with graceful Rob Roy canoes and pulling boats eternally stilled in midstream. I became haunted by the fact that this whole world, once filled with peace and solitude, color and light, and the energy of human interactions, was gone forever. And throughout all this I kept wondering about the black man. Who was he? And why was a young black person socializing with a group of well-appointed whites out in the middle of the wilderness of the Northeast? I slowly became obsessed with this man. Where did he come from. Where did he end?

The land use project was completed in the mid-1970s, and to celebrate the publication of the book there was a little gathering at a Boston hotel. All the bright lights of the late twentieth-century city were glittering in the well-appointed function rooms, and generations of people swept through the space in their swirling tropic muumuus and garish floral-patterned neckties. Here and there you could see a few of the remnants of the old Brahmin class of Boston to which Mr. Brewster belonged. They sailed ever upright through the crowd, with their clipped gray hair and their subdued gray tweeds, like the lofty ships that once carried the slaves and the rum and molasses that had earned them their family money. Much chatter, much clinking of cocktail glasses, the high sparkle of lights, and the smell of old wool and whiskey, and then, from within the crowd, I saw an unlikely figure.

A tall man dressed entirely in denim and a cowboy hat, with flowing chestnut hair falling around his shoulders, was determinedly working his way toward me through the happy throng. Once he had me cornered he fixed my eye with a know-it-all smile and asked if I was the one who had written the credit lines for the photographs taken by William Brewster, which had been published along with some of the other nineteenth-century photographs.

I said I had.

“Well you got them wrong,” he said bluntly. “Those pictures were taken by his manservant, a black guy named Gilbert.”

There was a lot of noise at this event, much braying laughter, and the loud bird twitter of happy voices. I thought I had missed something and leaned closer.

“Taken by who?” I asked.

“I said the photographs were taken by a black man, not by Brewster. He was the valet for Brewster. You got the captions wrong. They were taken by Gilbert. Robert A. Gilbert.”

He was practically shouting.

An ear-piercing whinny of laughter sounded out next to us.

“How do you know?” I shouted back.

“I know …”

“Let’s go to the bar …,” I said.

In spite of his swagger and his all-outdoors deportment, this apparent pioneer was a research assistant who worked in the dark inner forests of the stacks at the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard. Over the past few months he had been assembling and filing the correspondence of William Brewster for the library and said he had found evidence that Brewster was simply the point man in the field, and that this Gilbert, his valet, his gentleman’s gentleman and jack-of-all-trades, would do all the work, and then some. The photos, all two thousand of them, he claimed, were the work of this talented young man.

“Gilbert and Brewster were inseparable,” he said, “they went together everywhere, and before he died, Brewster arranged to have Gilbert taken on as assistant to the curator at the museum. He came along with Brewster’s entire collection of bird skins. Gilbert stayed on there until he died. He was known to everyone. The Brahmins made a pet of him. There are obituaries.”

Having informed me of this fact, he announced that he must be on his way, rose from his chair, and ambled out.

That at least answered part of the mystery. The small black man was the servant. But was he also the photographer? If he was, this new information helped explain how it came to pass that Brewster appears in some of his own photographs. Furthermore, none of the plates and none of the few surviving prints were signed. I only heard they were Brewster’s by word of mouth, that is to say, I heard that Brewster owned them. No one ever said he took them.

The thought that I might have discovered a trove of photographs by a heretofore unknown African American photographer was intriguing, all the more so since, as far as I knew, although there were many black photographers at the turn of the last century, not one was making photographs of landscapes—let alone birds’ nests.

During this period I had a Cambridge-based friend named Tremont Williams, an avid historical researcher who seemed to know half the people in Boston and Cambridge and was a skilled, if somewhat thinly spread, scholar who, it was said, could find anything you needed to know about anything. Tre, as his friends called him, was a unique species. To all outward appearances he was a white man. He had Caucasian features, light green eyes, and slightly wiry black hair. He looked more like one of the Black Irish you see around Boston, the purported descendants of Spanish sailors, shipwrecked on the Irish coast during the Armada. But Tre claimed he was actually African American, his white appearance resulting from some genetic throwback from some distant white relative who mixed his or her genes in with his basic African roots. To prove his lineage, he showed me once a photo of his parents, two handsome, dark-skinned people of obvious African heritage. He was descended, he said, from one of the original African families who lived on the northeastern side of Beacon Hill in Boston, in a district known as New Guinea in the seventeenth century. His father had attended Harvard, he said, but Tre himself had fled to Washington and had spent several years there socializing with an equally upper-class coterie of blacks. He now supported himself by research contracts and consultancies, and when he wasn’t otherwise employed he spent his time investigating overlooked black historical figures. It was Tre’s opinion that nearly every successful American had at least a drop of African blood in his or her veins. In this regard he was the opposite of certain whites who argue that all successful black people have at least a trace of white blood. Tre’s theories on the number of famous white people with African roots ranged from certain members of the fifteenth-century Medici family, to John James Audubon, Alexander Dumas, and even America’s blue-eyed boy, William Jefferson Clinton.

I had met Tre through a mutual friend and calculated that he would be able to help me with this newly garnered information about Mr. Brewster’s manservant. So I made a few more prints and arranged to meet him, showed him the pictures, and explained the background.

He looked them over indifferently.

“This kind of thing was common,” he said, pushing back the prints. “Sad, but common, especially in nineteenth-century America.”

Nineteenth-century naturalists and explorers, he explained, often had talented, and generally unrecognized, assistants (“usually black,” he said, although I’m not sure that was true) who are rarely mentioned in the official histories and biographies. Darwin had a black manservant who worked as his taxidermist. More to the point (and more contemporaneous with Gilbert and Brewster) was the emerging story of Matthew Henson, the African American assistant of Admiral Robert Peary. Tre claimed there was good evidence that Henson was actually the first man to the pole.

“So where do I begin?” I asked.

“You begin at the beginning, with his parents’ birth records, if you can find them, and then work back through the Middle Passage, if you can find any records, and then forward until you come to the end, with his death records. Then you fill in the rest by hunting through the extant documents, which in this case will undoubtedly be those recorded by the white man and therefore sketchy. Just a bunch of puzzle pieces,” he said.

And then, as I knew he would, he began to spew out leads and theories and countertheories, and then he looked at the photos again, most of which were of local environments around Cambridge, Belmont, and Concord.

He studied one photo in particular, leaned closer, turned it slightly.

“Do you have data on the glass plates?” he asked.

“On some of them, yes,” I said.

The one he was holding showed a road passing a stone wall, with a large elm on the left.

“That one happens to be Concord, 1905,” I said. “But that’s all I know.”

“Why don’t you attempt a rephotographic survey of the environment that these two worked in,” he said. “It’s all the vogue now. I think there are a couple of guys rephotographing all the western landscapes taken in the nineteenth century by Timothy O’Sullivan, and what’s his name—William Henry Jackson. Maybe you’ll learn something.”

It sounded like a good idea, and certainly far more attractive from my point of view than spending my summer days in the dark interiors of library stacks. So following Tre’s suggestion, I began a sporadic, disorganized attempt to retrieve those landscapes for which I had some documentation. I would seek out places between Cambridge and Lancaster, Massachusetts, where certain documented images, exposed between 1893 and 1915, had been, as the curious phrasing has it, “captured.” Later, as I learned more about the travels of Brewster and Gilbert, I expanded the range of my resurvey to the forests of Maine and New Hampshire, south to Virginia, where Gilbert was born, and even to France, where Gilbert apparently spent some years. The survey began to take on a life of its own and slowly I was drawn deeper and deeper into the search.

Several years after I discovered the plates, the Massachusetts Audubon Society acquired yet another estate with rural property (it already had four or five such holdings). This one was a substantial house in Canton, Massachusetts, that was once owned by a sometime painter and natural history filmmaker named Mildred Morse Allen. Over the years, along with the various properties, the society had also been acquiring artwork from its generous donors, including a large number of the original hand-colored first and second edition Audubon prints. To house these treasures, the organization decided to build a climate-controlled archive and exhibit hall in the Allen house and turn the property into a center for the visual arts. The Brewster glass plates were subsequently moved there from the questionable environment of the attic in Lincoln. Following this, as a result of yet another generous donation, the society obtained a state-of-the-art computer and began the long process of digitalizing all the glass plate negatives.

Compared to the slow, step-by-step process of creating a positive print in a darkroom, once a negative is digitalized, this ingenious computer allows a viewer to put an image on the screen in a matter of seconds. Furthermore, the device allows you to move into the image, and then, like an explorer in a lost country, move slowly through the landscape, enlarging various sections, inspecting details, lightening darkened areas to reveal things that perhaps even the photographer had not seen. One plate I found, for example, showed a pleasant view of a vine-covered house with a darkened surround of a porch. Wandering through this summery environment with the aid of the computer, I decided to lighten the dark porch to look for architectural details. To my surprise, from the deep obscurity a human face emerged. There was an old woman sitting in a rocking chair on the porch, glaring out at the cameraman angrily, her gray hair pulled severely back on her head. I’m not even sure the photographer—whoever he was—knew she was there.

Having gained permission to use this computer, I began moving ever inward into the world of the nineteenth century, wandering down country roads, following the tracks of a one-horse shay, or the wide, double lines of a Model T Ford. I looked at the incised scrollwork on the brooch of a woman sitting with a group of men in a tent somewhere in the North Woods. I inspected the loose shutters on a house in Lancaster, Massachusetts, and the hammers of a double-barreled shotgun held in the hands of a guide in the wilds around Lake Umbagog, in Maine. But mostly I looked at the lost landscapes of faces, the lines about the eyes, the unsmiling, steady set of lips, the cast of light on a woman’s cheek. And ultimately, it was through these images that I found the man.

Brewster’s retreat, “October Farm,” was located on Monument Street in Concord. The property ran down to the banks of the Concord River and included a long stretch of riverbank where Brewster had Swedish and Irish workers construct a series of small lean-tos and cabins. There is a trail that now runs along the west bank of the river and one day in summer, scouting along this path, I came across an odd structure set at the foot of the prominence known as Ball’s Hill. It was an arched stone doorway that led back into the bank of the hill and resembled one of those long barrows where the Neolithic Beaker People of the British Isles buried their dead. The interior of the arch was a dark tunnel with a soggy rotten leaf floor and thick with old cobwebs, but I pushed in. Inside, on the south wall, scratched in cement, I saw a graffito: “W.B. Sept 9 1916.”

At least I knew I had the right spot.

Just above the barrow I saw what looked like the remnants of a buried stone wall peeking out of the forest duff and began to clear away some of the soil. Slowly, the shape of a foundation emerged. Nearby was a similar ruin that I also cleared. From the riverside, I angled the camera up the hill to the foundation, where the floor would have been, and where, in one of the Brewster photos, you see a group of men and women seated in a line. Now it’s all trees and shrubs—old hemlocks, American filbert, some buckthorn (an alien plant that would not have been present in Brewster’s time), and also highbush blueberry, with silver maples, red maples, and buttonbush along the riverbank.

A little beyond the ruins of the cabins and the boathouse, I came upon an old wagon road leading away from the river and followed it. The road dipped down into a muddy hollow laced with horse tracks, and then rose up to higher ground. Soon I was passing through a landscape of dry pines and began coming upon strange twentieth-century archeological artifacts, fenders and discarded wheels of old cars, various machine parts, an engine, and here and there a few car bodies, mostly antique, and many of them foreign—Renaults, a Morris Minor, an old Volvo. I pushed on, rounded a bend, and saw ahead of me an ancient barn. Inside, in the half-light, I could see the gleam of a large, well-cared-for Stanley Steamer.

Beyond the barn was one of the most ramshackled dwellings this side of Appalachia. It was a seventeenth-century house with a hogbacked roof and broken windows. The door stoops and the sills were bowed and leaning back to earth, and there was a shredded curtain blowing out of an upstairs window like a ghost. The house appeared to be uninhabited, but as I approached I saw a frail old man standing in the bare front yard, looking at me quizzically. He was dressed in torn coveralls and a tattered work shirt, and was wearing a pair of eyeglasses that had been repaired with Scotch tape that covered half of the lens of his left eye.

I approached tentatively, introduced myself, made my excuses and soon fell into conversation with him and learned that his name was Sanfred Bensen. One of the first things he told me was that he was “eighty-five years of age” and that he had been born in that very house in the late nineteenth century.

“I have rarely left here,” he said. “By choice, you understand. Once, in the year nineteen and fifty three, my sister and I undertook a journey to Lawrence, Massachusetts, but I shan’t do that again, I can tell you. There were too many signs, and the automobiles were moving at a very high rate of speed.”

Lawrence, it should be noted, is no more than twenty-five or so miles from Concord. In fact, it turned out Bensen rarely went even to the town of Concord, a distance of no more than two miles.

I spent over two hours with the old man talking about the old days on the Concord River and his adventures—such as they were. He seemed to have an indefatigable ability to stand in one spot, telling stories. At no point in our conversation, however, did he invite me to sit down in one of the kitchen chairs that were strewn about the yard, and he did not invite me into the house for tea, which, given the condition of the exterior of the house, was perhaps a good thing. He rambled on interminably about times past, the late afternoon sun glistening off the single, scratched lens of his untaped eyeglass as he spoke. How he was able to see anything was a mystery; in fact, he rarely fixed my eye, which made me wonder if he was perhaps legally blind.

While we were talking I did a little private calculation and figured that he was probably old enough to have known William Brewster, who would have been his nearest neighbor when he was a boy. At the appropriate moment, I asked.

“Oh, yes, indeed,” he said in his reedy old voice, “I knew Dr. Brewster well, and I am here to tell you that he was as fine a man as ever walked the earth.”

This generated a litany of the qualities of old “Dr.” Brewster. More than I thought I could endure at this point. I had been on my feet for a few hours already, I was dying of thirst, my legs were crumbling beneath me, and yet I knew I had struck a rich find—someone who actually knew the supposed photographer of the lost plates.

“I am here to tell you that Dr. Brewster had the kindest eyes of any man who walked the earth,” Bensen said.

This appeared to be a favorite phrase of his: “Dr. Brewster was the gentlest soul of any man who walked the earth,” he said. “Dr. Brewster was among the most generous people who ever walked the earth.”

Bensen’s father had been employed by Brewster and as a boy Sanfred would help out around October Farm. Finally, at great risk to my legs, I ventured to ask him if, by any chance, he had ever heard of a man named Gilbert?

“Why, Gilbert was my best friend when I was a boy,” he said enthusiastically.

I had been digging around in attics and libraries of Cambridge and Boston for over a year when I first met Sanfred Bensen, and here in my own backyard, it seemed, I had found the equivalent of a talking library devoted entirely to Gilbert and Brewster.

Although Gilbert was older, Bensen told me, the two of them spent a lot of time together whenever Gilbert was out at October Farm. He said the man I was searching for was a success in everything he did. Inasmuch as he was the personal servant of Brewster and therefore exposed to city lights, influential people, and distant venues, he was far more cosmopolitan than his young friend Bensen, and the two of them would often sit by the riverbank while Gilbert spun out stories of his various adventures at home and abroad. Bensen said that Gilbert was a favorite of the wealthy Bostonians and would commonly associate with them during expeditions to the North Country.

“He was invited to parties with the finest of them. He ate at table with linen cloths and silverware, and he knew how to drink claret wine, and how to hold a glass. He was a perfect gentleman among gentleman, always wore dark suits of the finest wool and starched collars, even here in the countryside. And he knew his birds better than Dr. Brewster, I can tell you. He could name any song he heard, and if you saw a mere flash of a birdwing, why, he would know what bird that was.”

“Did he ever take photographs?” I lifted my camera suggestively.