SEARSPORT, Maine — It’s hard to look away from the old photograph that has long been a part of the Penobscot Marine Museum’s collections — the photo that at first glance shows a strange chair-on-wheels that seems to double as a cage.
At second glance, you see the boy inside the metal cage, his solemn eyes peeking out from behind the bars. The photo shows the infamous tramp chair, one of about 13 that were made in 1896 by Sanford Baker, a deputy sheriff in Oakland. Baker built the 800-pound steel behemoths as a device to get hobos, petty criminals and other undesired folks out of town.
And for anyone who has wondered at the photograph, this summer the chair itself will be on display at the museum as part of the exhibit “Exploring the Magic of Photography: Painting with Light.”
“That picture obviously jumps out at you. The idea was you’d get put in this chair, dragged through the town, people would laugh at you and throw things at you. You’d get brought to the next town and be the problem of the next town,” Kevin Johnson, the museum’s photo archivist, said this week. “It’s amazing when you only see a picture of something that lives up to its hype. The chair is even more horrifying in person.”
Johnson said that the chair ended up at the museum because of the enduring popularity of the photograph of the boy sitting within it. This year, museum officials took on the “impossible” job of picking the 20 best photographs out of the 140,000 in its collection, he said.
“We kept narrowing it down and the chair photo kept coming into the mix,” he said. “We were trying to figure out if it’s a great photo — or if it’s the object that kept drawing our imaginations.”
One of the remaining chairs is part of the Bangor Historical Society’s collection, and it has been on loan to the Bangor Police Department for display in the police museum. Melissa Gerety, director of the historical society, said that she was glad to loan the chair to the Penobscot Marine Museum for its photography exhibit.
“Of course we were excited to say yes,” she said. “Any opportunity to showcase our collection with more people is something we’re interested in.”
According to Matt Bishop, curator of the Bangor Historical Society, the chair is part of a long tradition of public humiliation that stretches “way back to medieval days.” Another of Baker’s tramp chairs now is on display at the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, D.C. he said.
“It was a little bit cheaper to buy one of the chairs than it was for some of the smaller towns to have a prison or a jail,” he said.
But Baker’s hope that state lawmakers would order every Maine town to have a tramp chair was foiled when they voted against the law.
“I’d like to think they didn’t because they thought it was an inhumane way of dealing with a problem that in many ways is still with us,” Johnson said.
The photo archivist wasn’t sure how much the chairs were used for their intended purpose, but that he knows they were exhibited during the first decade of the 20th century as a sort of sideshow during parades and circuses.
“You could get your picture taken in it,” he said, adding that will not be true at the museum.
Although visitors this summer will be able to walk into a huge camera, step inside a historic darkroom, watch a tintype being made, make a pinhole camera and use it to take a photograph, among many other photography-related activities, they can’t sit in the tramp chair.
“It can’t be opened. People can’t get inside of it for selfies, although that would be kind of fun,” Johnson said.
The heavy chair was transported from Bangor to Searsport with the help of a boom truck from American Concrete Industries of Veazie. At the museum, it will be next to an enlarged photo of the boy inside of it — a photo which, in the end, was determined not to be one of the museum’s 20 best pictures.
“Hopefully it will be the subject of some good-natured debates,” Johnson said. “It is obviously a very subjective process. What makes a photograph great? We’d like to challenge and engage our audience with this question.”
The exhibit “Exploring the Magic of Photography: Painting with Light” will be on display through Oct. 18 at the Penobscot Marine Museum in Searsport. For more information, call 548-0334 or visit the website www.penobscotmarinemuseum.org.