| George Eastman was
born in 1854 in the village of Waterville, south of
Utica, in the middle of New York State. His
great-grandparents had moved there from New England, and his parents lived on neighboring farms before their marriage. The Eastmans’ house, which they bought or built about 1850, stood on a thirty-acre nursery of fruit trees and rose bushes.
George had two sisters. Ellen Maria was ten years older
than George and could be his babysitter. Ellen pulled
Baby George in a red wagon to the Main Street of
Waterville while she did the family banking and errands.
Katie was two years older then George. She became ill
with polio before she was two and couldn’t walk without
crutches. As soon as Katie learned to read, she read
stories to George. George liked to dig in the garden with his shovel and rake that his father had given him. He thought that he was a big help to the men who worked in the nursery but he probably wasn’t. The men enjoyed his company and regaled him with stories of great Indian trackers of the central New York State region.
The Eastman children rode with their parents as the
family horse trudged and the buggy rattled over plank
roads to the railroad station in Utica. There the
children’s father, George Washington Eastman, took the
train every Sunday during the school year to Rochester,
130 miles to the west. They returned with their mother
to tend the nursery and their own school lessons in
Waterville. G. W. Eastman had started a business school
in Rochester in 1842, two years before he married Maria
Kilbourn and twelve years before his son was born. The
father spent the week in Rochester as school principal
before returning to Waterville to share weekends and
summers with his family and work in his nursery.
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A daguerreotype of
George Washington Eastman (1815-1862) in 1850 |
A daguerreotype of Maria Kilbourn Eastman (1822-1907)
in 1850
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This ambrotype of George
Eastman, age 3, may have been taken by an itinerant
photographer visiting Waterville, or in a studio in Utica or Rochester—
where George Washington Eastman had a business college |
| Early Eastman employees, ca. 1888, taken with the first Kodak camera. |
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Interior of the Eastman
Theatre with Eastman School of Music students on stage. |
| GE on a camping trip in 1917 |
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GE and Explorer/photographer
Osa Johnson bake cakes in Africa. |
