Andrew J. Russell photographs of the American Civil War, M4013

Nineteenth-century American Civil War and Union Pacific Railroad photographer Andrew J. Russell was born in Walpole, New Hampshire, on March 20, 1829, and raised in New York State. After earning several commissions as a portrait and landscape painter, he helped form a local militia at the outset of the Civil War. He learned photography after joining the Army and, in the spring of 1863, was made the Army's first official photographer under General Herman Haupt. Following the War he was hired by the Union Pacific Railroad to photographically document the construction and completion of the eastern portion of the American transcontinental railroad.

Russell died in Brooklyn, New York, in September 1902.

Finding aid for A. J. Russell Photographs of the Construction of the Union Pacific Railroad, Western Americana Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, accessed March 4, 2014, http://beinecke.library.yale.edu/collections/highlights/construction-union-pacific-railroad. Finding aid for Andrew J. Russell Stereograph Collection, Central Pacific Railroad Photographic History Museum, accessed March 4, 2014, http://cprr.org/Museum/Russell_Catalog.html.