Lindsley, Lawrence Denny, 1878-1975

Photographer, of Seattle, Wash.

Lawrence Denny Lindsley (1878-1975) was the grandson of Seattle pioneer and entrepeneur David T. Denny, who arrived in Seattle in 1851 with the first party of the city's founders. Lindsley's mother, Abbie Denny Lindsley (b. 1858), was David and Louisa Boren Denny's third child, and his father, builder Edward L. Lindsley, arrived in Seattle in 1873. The couple married in 1877 and Lawrence, their first child, was born in 1878. An early explorer of the North Cascades, Lawrence Denny Lindsley became a charter member of the Mountaineers Club in 1907. He became famous for his many photos of Mount Rainier, the Lake Chelan region, Snoqualmie Pass, and other areas, and he avidly studied the native plants and wildlife which he captured in his photographs. In 1903, Lindsley started work at the W.P. Romans Photographic Company in Seattle, which Asahel Curtis then purchased in 1910. He later worked for Edward S. Curtis, helping to develop some of the gold tone negatives that Curtis used in his famous "Indians of North America" series. Sometime between 1910 and 1914, Lindsley moved to Lake Chelan and lived on his parents' land near 25 Mile Creek. During this time, he worked for the Great Northern Railroad photographing Glacier National Park for the railroad's tourist literature. He also began his extensive photographic study, lasting several years, of Lake Chelan and the North Cascades. In these Chelan years and later, Lindsley worked as a wilderness guide, probably for the Mountaineers, leading parties along the lake and into the Stehekin wilderness. In Sept. 1916 Lindsley, with Dan Devore, was hired by the Great Northern Railroad as the guide, cook, and packer for the party of author Mary Roberts Rinehart through the Lake Chelan area. The taciturn Lindsley figured prominently as "Silent Lawrie" in Rinehart's published account of the expedition, and in a later novel based in the Cascades. When Lindsley returned to Seattle he resumed working in Edward Curtis's studio, continued work on his own landscape and nature photography throughout the 1920s, and worked on the technique of lantern slide photography. Lindsley was also a prolific writer, and kept journals for most of his adult life. He wrote lengthy captions on the backs of many of his photographs, expanding on the content of the photo by adding history, context, and detail which cumulatively provide a lively and personal depiction of early Seattle and Washington State. Lindsley married twice. His first marriage, to Pearl A. Miller in 1918, ended when his wife and newborn daughter, Abbie, died in 1920. In 1944, Lindsley married photographer and coloring artist Sarah Sonju, working with her in his studio until her death in 1960. Living in Seattle's Wallingford District for over fifty years, Lindsley continued to photograph into his nineties. Lawrence Denny Lindsley died in 1975.

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