Archives West Finding Aid

While working as a miner, woodsman, and wilderness guide as well as a photographer, Lawrence D. Lindsley took thousands of photographs of the Washington State landscape, from the Cascades to the Olympic coast, and east to Lake Chelan. Lindsley photographed everything from grand landscapes to the individual blossoms of native plants, as well as mining camps, early settlements, and home and family scenes.

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 (born 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.

Lindsley grew up with a love of the outdoors and a pioneer's spirit of adventure. At the age of 11, Lindsley helped his father with the construction of his grandfather's real estate office, a log cabin at the foot of Queen Anne Hill near Republican Street. Now known as the Denny Cabin and relocated to the Historic Cabin Park in Federal Way, the structure was several blocks northwest of the Great Seattle Fire which swept through downtown Seattle five weeks after the cabin's completion. A frightened Lindsley watched from his Denny Hill home with his sister Mabel on his lap as the fire destroyed several city blocks, but spared the newly constructed cabin.

In 1895, Lindsley went to work at the Esther Mine at the head of Gold Creek in Kittitas County. David Denny owned the Esther Mine in Ptarmigan Park, and many Denny men worked at the mine, including Lindsley's uncle Victor W.S. Denny, who appears in many of Lindsley's photographs. Around the same time, David Denny was also in charge of the construction of a wagon road across Snoqualmie Pass. In the late 1890s, Lindsley worked and took pictures at both the road project and the mine, documenting at the latter the mine itself as well as life at the mine cabin. Later, Lindsley and Rolland Herschel Denny climbed the ridge connecting the Four Brothers formation--name for David Denny's sons John, Thomas and Victor, and his son-in-law Edward Lindsley-- to Chikamin Peak. It was probably on this trip that Denny and Lindsley inscribed their names on the rock immediately northwest of Four Brothers peak, as depicted in Lindsley's photograph. An early explorer of the North Cascades, 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 parent’s 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 September 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 90s. Lawrence D. Lindsley died in 1975.