Fred Park Stevens was born on July 19, 1872, near Spinney, Park County, Colorado, to H. Hoyt Stevens and Adee Euphosene Fillebrown Steven. In 1876, the family moved to Colorado Springs. He attended the St. Louis Manual Training School at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, graduating fourth in a class of sixty-one students. In 1892, he entered Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, majoring in mechanical engineering. To earn money for college, Fred made blueprints for students. In 1896, after graduation, he returned home to Colorado Springs and resided in the Alta Vista Hotel, managed by his father.
In 1897, Stevens took his photography skills to the next level by partnering with Wilbur E. McChristie, founder of the Nonpareil Portrait and Publishing Company, based in Ohio. McChristie, ill with tuberculosis, had relocated to Colorado Springs for his health.
Later that year, Stevens hiked up iconic Pike’s Peak (14,115 feet above sea level) and spent a week at the summit, waiting for the perfect moment to capture the sunrise in a photograph. His image from the mountaintop, an exposure of a fiftieth of a second, received immense praise and gained widespread attention. Harper’s Weekly published the picture in its December 11, 1897, issue.
This accomplishment was followed by a companion photograph, “Sunset behind Pike’s Peak.” In less than four years, more than 60,000 copies of these two photographs have been sold, wholesale and retail, either as black and white prints or hand-colored with watercolors.
Having bought out his partner in the spring of 1898, Stevens moved into a new ground-floor studio, calling his business Stevens Fotograferie. The operator hired to oversee portraiture had previously worked at Napoleon Sarony’s prestigious gallery. Stevens’ firm specialized in Colorado views, interiors, and portraits of animals, hand-colored or black and white. They produced lantern slides, provided photocopying and enlarging services, and developed and printed photographs by amateurs.
In 1899, the Lackawana Railroad Company commissioned Stevens to photograph their route. In February 1900, he made views of Pueblo, Colorado, including a group portrait by flashlight of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen ball at the Colorado Mineral Palace.
In August 1900, Foltz and Hardy, Colorado Springs’ new book and stationery store, became the general agents for Steven’s sunrise and sunset photographs, selling them at 50 cents a pair. The contract called for the delivery of photographs amounting to $4,500 retail, at the rate of 5,000 photos per week if required. This large number of prints could only be offered because Stevens had invented an automatic, electric printing machine capable of printing 900 prints an hour.
In 1902, Stevens’ photographs were featured in Denver the Coming City: A Collection of Forty Instantaneous Photographs of Life in Denver, published by F. S. Thayer in a limited edition of 1,000 numbered copies. Later that year his work was included in a souvenir viewbook of Colorado Springs published by Critic Publishing. The booklet of twenty-four photographs included “Pike’s Peak at Sunset,” the first time this popular photograph appeared in a book.
Under advice from his physician, Stevens decided to move to a lower elevation. Stevens sold his photographic business to L. A. Hatch of Orange, New York, in December 1902. He also sold all rights to his famous Sunset and Sunrise views to the Foltz and Hardy bookstore. Stevens had married Elsie Slayback on June 19, 1901. When they left Denver in the next year, they planned to visit tourist attractions in the Eastern states before resuming his photographic business, perhaps in California.
In December 1902, Stevens began work for the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, to be held in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1904. The Fair planned to issue photographic admission passes. To efficiently accomplish this, Stevens invented an automatic electric printing machine capable of printing 600 prints an hour. He received a patent for his invention. An average of 1,200 people were photographed daily, setting a world record. The entire process including taking the picture, developing and pasting it into the passport took approximately an hour.
In 1905, Stevens brought his printing technology to the Lewis & Clark Exposition held in Portland, Oregon. In December 1908, Stevens was appointed the official photographer of the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition held in Seattle the following year.
Stevens moved to Vancouver, British Columbia, in 1913 where he managed the commercial photography firm, Canadian Photo Company.
Stevens died on December 1, 1915, at the age of forty-three, in Vancouver, leaving his wife a widow. Stevens was buried in Evergreen Cemetery in Colorado Springs.
Thank you to Beverly W. Brannan for proofreading this post. Brigham Young University kindly provided scans of Stevens’ sunset and sunrise photographs.
