Antiques Roadshow

GUEST: These albums are from 1887 and 1888.

They're photographs of the mountain peaks of what is now Rocky Mountain National Park.

My great-grandfather, William Hallett, was an early resident of Estes Park, Colorado, and he did a lot of hiking and climbing of the, the peaks in that area.

APPRAISER: Wow.

GUEST: He met Frederick Chapin, who was a mountaineer and amateur photographer... APPRAISER: Mm-hmm.

GUEST: ...and he took these photographs and later presented these albums to my great-grandfather.

APPRAISER: Wow.

That's amazing.

GUEST: It says "To W.L.

Hallett as a remembrance of..." and then it lists phrases about the various pictures, and it's signed "From your friend, F.H.

Chapin."

APPRAISER: Wow.

My favorite is "The grizzly bear"--"We did not run away.

(laughs) GUEST: (laughing): Yes.

APPRAISER: Many of the things that we see on this page are actually images that we can find later in the album, which is fantastic.

In total, there are more than a hundred pictures in all three albums together.

There's an image of a peak in what is now Rocky Mountain National Park that's named after your great-grandfather.

GUEST: Yes.

APPRAISER: Amazing.

Yeah.

So let's l-- take a look at that picture here.

Here we go.

So here is Mount Hallett, uh, now known as Hallett Peak.

Is that right?

GUEST: Correct.

APPRAISER: One, I think, very interesting element of this album is its association with Frederick Chapin, who is someone who was part of that movement coming to Colorado, exploring, summiting peaks that had never been summited before, naming them.

GUEST: Some of these pictures are the first pictures ever taken of some of those peaks.

APPRAISER: Wow.

Wow.

That's incredible.

So not only was he, uh, exploring terrain that had not really been explored before, but he was also carrying very heavy camera equipment with him in order to get these incredible pictures.

He really helped usher in this sense of using the space as recreation, for fun, for the beauty, for the sake of being outdoors.

And I think that that's part of what makes these albums so special and so interesting.

GUEST: My great-grandfather had helped carry the glass plates for the camera.

APPRAISER: Okay.

Yeah.

GUEST: At-at certain times.

APPRAISER: So these images required carrying all of their glass plates.

They had to be exposed and fixed in the field.

The albums themselves are quite rare.

There are some in collections in Colorado, elsewhere, but I haven't seen them in the market before.

At auction, for the three albums together, I would value them between $6,000 and $9,000.

GUEST: Wow.