Ferdinand 'Ferd' Brady, Photographer of Tulalip and Anacortes

Ferdinand "Ferd" Brady spent more than four decades photographing communities around northern Puget Sound. His earliest surviving postcards document Marysville, Everett, Tulalip, Langley, logging operations, and other Washington towns. Later, after settling in Anacortes, Brady became one of the city's most prolific photographers, recording everything from fishing fleets and pulp mills to parades, storefronts, shipyards, automobile accidents, and ordinary community life.

For postcard collectors, Brady's work is particularly interesting because it crosses several collecting fields. His early real photo postcards include small-town views, occupational photography, Indigenous history, sports teams, logging, transportation, and commercial buildings. His later negatives provide an unusually deep record of Anacortes during the years between the two World Wars and through the enormous industrial activity of World War II.

From Oregon to Marysville

Ferdinand Brady was born in Benton County, Oregon, on March 27, 1880, to William and Mary Brady. By the early 1900s he had moved north to Marysville, Washington. There he became acquainted with a couple named Woods who operated a local photography studio.

Brady learned photography and the commercial side of the business from the Woodses and eventually purchased their studio when they retired. He worked professionally in Marysville from approximately 1907 until 1911, when he moved his studio to Everett.

These early years placed Brady in a rapidly changing part of Washington. Logging, railroads, mills, agriculture, and new towns were reshaping Snohomish County, while postcard collecting had become enormously popular. A local photographer could make a living producing portraits and commercial work while also selling photographic views through stores and directly to customers.

Brady's surviving postcards from this period include Marysville and Everett street scenes, industrial subjects, lumbering, landscapes, and views from communities as far away as Langley and Soap Lake. The Museum of History & Industry preserves 134 of his photographic postcards dating from roughly 1907 to 1920.

Photographing Tulalip

Brady's most historically significant early work came from the Tulalip Reservation, just west of Marysville.

During the 1910s, Brady received a federal government contract to photograph the reservation and the Tulalip Indian School. The University of Washington identifies the work specifically with the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs. Brady also marketed some of these photographs commercially as postcards.

The surviving images date primarily from about 1910 to 1917, with many made around 1912. They form a broad photographic record of the reservation and the federal boarding school operating there.

Brady photographed school buildings, dormitories, classrooms, the dining hall, hospital staff, the sawmill, gardens, work crews, athletic teams, canoe races, community celebrations, families, and people working along Tulalip Bay. Other images show the Tulalip band, Treaty Day activities, logging and log-boom work, automobiles, horses, and people in their homes.

These photographs need to be understood within the history of the institution Brady was hired to document.

The Tulalip boarding school was part of the federal Indian education system created to assimilate Native children into white American society. Students were separated from traditional forms of education, prohibited from speaking their Native languages, and assigned vocational and maintenance work as part of the school program. The Tulalip school opened in 1905 and eventually closed in 1932 as federal Indian education policy began to change.

That context makes Brady's postcards more than ordinary local views. Some images reflect the institution as the federal government wanted it presented, with orderly buildings, sports teams, vocational training, and organized activities. At the same time, the photographs preserve individual students, families, canoe traditions, Treaty Day gatherings, workers, and other aspects of Tulalip life that extend beyond that institutional story.

Commercial postcards from the Tulalip photographs

Brady did not limit the Tulalip photographs to his government assignment. He produced photographic postcards from the negatives and sold them commercially.

This creates an unusual overlap between government documentation and the postcard trade. A photograph initially made while working under federal contract could later circulate as a souvenir or collectible image.

The University of Washington holds a group of 25 postcard-format photographic prints devoted specifically to the Tulalip Indian School. MOHAI's larger collection contains dozens more, including multiple versions of some subjects.

For collectors, identification can matter considerably. A generic view of the school grounds tells one story, while a card identifying a particular sports team, Treaty Day celebration, family, canoe race, or occupational activity has considerably greater historical specificity.

Original period captions should be preserved when cataloging these cards, but they should not automatically be adopted as modern descriptive language. Historical postcard captions and older archival descriptions may use terminology that is outdated, overly broad, or inaccurate. When the identity of a person, family, or event can be established through institutional records, that information is generally more useful than a generic period description.

Everett and other Washington views

Although the Tulalip series dominates Brady's surviving early postcard archive, his camera traveled considerably farther.

MOHAI's collection includes views of Everett, Marysville, Langley, Mukilteo, Snohomish County communities, and locations east of the Cascades. Subjects include streets, businesses, lumber mills, logging, transportation, public buildings, and landscape views.

These cards are often the ones worth studying carefully for secondary details.

A photograph ostensibly showing a street may include a readable hotel sign, automobile dealership, theater marquee, telephone pole, railroad crossing, or storefront. An industrial view may identify machinery, a mill, a logging company, or workers whose occupation creates collector interest far beyond the Brady name.

As with most regional RPPC photographers, the subject usually matters more than the photographer's signature alone.

Bower & Brady and the move to Anacortes

By the middle of the 1920s, Brady had begun working in Anacortes with local photographer George William Bower.

Their photographs were marked Bower & Brady, and together they produced what the Anacortes Museum believes are probably the earliest aerial photographs of the city. The surviving views show Anacortes from above at a time when aviation itself remained novel and aerial photography required substantially more effort than it would only a few decades later.

In 1926, Ferd and his wife, Lena, moved permanently to Anacortes. Brady purchased the existing Anacortes Studio from photographers Anna Bull and Helen Iverson and renamed the business Brady's Anacortes Studio. The studio moved several times before eventually settling at 410 Commercial Avenue.

Anacortes would provide Brady with subjects for the remainder of his professional career.

Photographing a working waterfront town

Brady's Anacortes photographs are exceptionally broad.

He made conventional studio portraits and photographed houses and commercial buildings, but he also became a chronicler of events happening around town. When there was a flood, fire, automobile accident, celebration, or unusual event, Brady brought a camera.

His photographs show commercial fishing fleets crowded into the harbor, cannery and mill workers, the Anacortes Veneer cooperative, local markets, businesses, schools, sporting events, early aviation, bicycles, automobiles, community celebrations, and the popular Marineers' Pageant. He photographed accidents for insurance companies, made pictures for Anacortes High School yearbooks, and processed film for Snyder's Drug Store.

This kind of work is especially valuable today because Brady was not selecting subjects based solely on scenic beauty. He was making photographs because somebody needed a record of a building, accident, gathering, boat, graduating class, or business.

The result is a visual record of everyday Anacortes that is substantially richer than a conventional tourist postcard catalog.

World War II shipbuilding

World War II added another important industrial chapter to Brady's career.

During the war, Brady held a contract to photograph boats under construction at all three Anacortes shipyards. The assignment produced a record of the city's wartime maritime industry at a moment when Pacific Northwest shipyards were operating at extraordinary levels of activity.

For collectors, these photographs can have crossover appeal to maritime, military, shipbuilding, occupational, and Anacortes history.

Not every photograph from this later period was necessarily issued as a postcard. By the 1930s and 1940s, Brady's business encompassed portraiture, commercial photography, insurance documentation, yearbook work, and commissioned prints in addition to postcard imagery.

That distinction is important. A Brady photograph is not automatically a Brady postcard.

Brady's cameras

The Anacortes Museum preserves unusually specific information about Brady's working equipment.

He owned a wooden portrait camera dating from around 1917 that used large 8-by-10-inch glass plate negatives, along with a C-4 box camera using 4-by-5-inch film negatives.

These relatively large negatives could capture far more detail than is immediately apparent in a postcard-sized print. On a sharp original photograph, distant signs, faces, machinery, boats, and architectural details may remain surprisingly legible under magnification.

That detail is one reason original Brady photographic prints can be so rewarding to examine.

Identifying Brady postcards

Brady's early postcard work is well documented as genuine photographic postcards. Both the University of Washington and MOHAI describe their holdings as photographic prints in postcard format.

As with any suspected RPPC, the image itself should still be examined. An original photographic card should display continuous tones rather than the regular dot structure of a mechanically printed reproduction.

Brady's name may appear in the image or on the card, while some photographs are identifiable only through comparison with archived negatives or other known copies.

Cards marked Bower & Brady belong to the brief Anacortes partnership with George Bower in the mid-1920s. Later material may carry the Brady studio name.

The absence of a visible Brady credit does not necessarily rule out attribution. Thousands of his negatives survive, making archival comparison unusually practical for an otherwise unidentified Washington photograph.

A photographic archive almost lost

The survival of Brady's Anacortes work came remarkably close to chance.

Brady retired in 1952. Shortly afterward, Wallie Funk, the new co-owner and editor of the Anacortes American, noticed workers removing boxes from Brady's former studio. The boxes contained Brady's prints and negatives and were headed for the dump.

Funk paid the workers $25 to take the material to the newspaper office instead.

That small intervention preserved thousands of photographs.

The Anacortes Museum today holds roughly 3,600 Brady images within the Wallie Funk Collection, while museum accounts place the broader number of Brady photographs rescued and selected for preservation at more than 4,000. The collection documents Anacortes from approximately 1924 through Brady's retirement in 1952.

Additional Brady material survives at the University of Washington, the Museum of History & Industry, and Western Washington University's Center for Pacific Northwest Studies.

Notes and market conditions from North West Postcards

Ferd Brady postcards appear considerably less often in the general postcard market than cards from prolific regional publishers such as Ellis or Sawyer.

Unfortunately, public completed-sale data is thin enough that I would be cautious about assigning a narrow price range to his work. A documented auction record exists for a 1912 real photo postcard showing the Tulalip band, and other Brady cards surface periodically, but there is not enough readily accessible sales information to establish a dependable photographer-wide market.

Common scenic or ordinary town views should primarily be valued according to location and subject. A Brady signature can strengthen attribution, but it will not transform an otherwise common photograph into an expensive card.

The Tulalip photographs are a different matter. Clearly identified students, families, leaders, canoe activities, Treaty Day events, sports teams, occupations, or reservation scenes have significant historical content and appeal to several collecting fields. These should be researched individually rather than treated as generic Washington RPPCs.

Strong Anacortes material can also have substantial crossover interest. Fishing fleets, shipyards, canneries, pulp and veneer mills, early aviation, automobile accidents, commercial interiors, readable storefronts, and Bower & Brady aerial views are the kinds of subjects I would expect to outperform generic landscapes.

At this point, I would rather leave an unusual Brady card unpriced while researching the subject than apply a blanket $10 or $20 value simply because another card by the same photographer sold in that range.

Collector's perspective

Brady's work is compelling because he photographed northern Puget Sound from several very different positions.

At Tulalip, he was at times a government-contracted photographer documenting a federal institution, while also producing photographs that entered the commercial postcard market.

In Marysville and Everett, he was a regional photographer recording towns, industries, and landscapes during the height of the real photo postcard era.

In Anacortes, he became something closer to a community documentarian. He photographed whatever happened in front of him: boats, mills, stores, accidents, celebrations, airplanes, workers, schoolchildren, and the changing waterfront.

That breadth makes attribution especially worthwhile.

A card with a small Brady credit in the corner may turn out to document an Indian boarding school, a vanished business, an early airplane flight, a fishing fleet, a logging operation, or a town street that no longer exists.

Those are the postcards where the photographer's name is only the beginning of the research.

Additional reading

• "Ferd Brady", Anacortes Museum.
• "Ferdinand Brady Photographic Postcards", Museum of History & Industry.
• "Ferdinand Brady Photographic Postcards of Tulalip Indian School, Washington State", University of Washington Libraries Special Collections.
• "Wallie Funk Collection", Anacortes Museum.
• "George Bower", Anacortes Museum.
• "Edson, Brady & Juleen: Three Photographers Active at Tulalip Early in the 20th Century", League of Snohomish County Heritage Organizations.

Example postcards