THOM 9 | Fall / Winter 2017

CREATOR
“Although Thomasville had dozens of
photographers working contemporaneously with
the Mollers,” Ephraim says, “the Moller Studio in one
form or another was in continuous operation from
1886 to 1956. The time period [during which] A.W.
lived and worked in Thomasville really covers two,
and almost three economic periods.”
The Moller family relocated from England to
Thomasville in 1885, on the recommendation of a
cousin in New York. A.W. was one of six children
brought to America after his father’s ship brokering
business went bust, reportedly from “heavy losses
in Italy;” he was 18 when the family settled in
South Georgia, during the booming tourist economy
ushered in by Thomasville’s Resort Era.
“The Historical Society promotes [the] Resort
Era, from roughly 1875 to 1905, as the dominant
period in establishing Thomasville’s civic identity,”
Ephraim says. “From 1880 to 1890, Thomasville’s
population doubled.”
predicted that his images would come to serve
not only as lone visual samples of a booming,
post-emancipation Thomasville, but as Southern
contributions to the visual narrative of American
life at the turn of the 20th century.
According to Thomas County Historical Society
Curator of Collections Ephraim Rotter, A.W. was a
“middle-middle class” trained studio portraitist who
likely chose additional subjects – Resort Era hotels,
landmarks, African American life, plantations and
more – based on what would sell.
Ephraim works unceasingly to digitize the Historical
Society’s expanding lot of hundreds of thousands
of images, including 865 glass-plate negatives
and an estimated 1,000 prints and postcards from
Moller Studio alone. Former Thomasville Times-
Enterprise publisher Ed Kelly donated much of the
collection. Wendell Tidwell, whose family owned a
photography studio, donated two of A.W.’s cameras.
Other contributions, Ephraim says, come in from the
descendants of locals and tourists.
Before Henry Flagler expanded the American
railway down into Florida, the southernmost stop
was Thomasville. Midwesterners came to take in
the air and warmer, drier climate; they filled resort
hotels in the downtown area, bought plantations
and built homes – many of which are still standing
and on the historic register.
A.W. shot a vast range of subjects during that
time – the hotels and boarding houses, natural
and man-made landmarks, African American life,
Moller was one of
Thomasville’s first
storytellers, providing a
window into the earliest
chapters of our area’s
ongoing narrative.
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