- Oh, if these pictures could just talk.

(acoustic guitar music) - [Narrator] The history, the art, the beauty in these pictures is unforgettable, but when Leo Beachy died, his photos almost died along with them.

This is the woman who wouldn't give up and finally got the help she needed to share his photos with the world.

- It's nearly 2800 pictures.

Take all of these glass plate negatives, get them onto the computers so they could be shared with the entire community.

- Uncle Leo means an awful lot to me for the legacy that he's left me.

- [Narrator] This is Leo Beachy's legacy.

A legacy nearly lost.

- It's technically perfect.

(upbeat banjo music) These show a man of talent who was making these photographs.

- They have depth to them and meaning.

- He left us a Garrett County in pictures.

- He spoke of nature and he spoke of the environment, conservation, he was a visionary.

- [Man] Couldn't ask for anything nicer.

- [Narrator] In the early 1900's, Leo Beachy photographed, what are now considered, treasures.

Images of life in the Hills of Western Maryland, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania.

But when Beachy died in 1927, his negatives vanished.

This woman was sure of it because decades ago she helped throw them away.

- Sure, I feel guilty.

But I was so young, I did what my peers told me to do.

And I hope that I'm compensating now.

- [Narrator] And by all accounts, she is.

Maxine Beachy Broadwater is Leo Beachy's niece.

It took many years, some detective work and a lot of luck but Maxine finally recovered some of her uncle's precious glass plate negatives.

- [Maxine] You can't imagine how excited I was when I started looking at these.

- [Narrator] She has the incredible story of how they were lost and found.

But more than that, Maxine has the story of the man himself, her uncle Leo, whose legacy almost disappeared forever.

(classical music) On this hill in Garrett County, Maryland the views were beautiful.

Farm life was tough, but productive.

The winters sometimes brutal.

This is Mount Nebo where Leo Beachy was raised.

He was one of 10 children His dad and his mother were farmers.

- He was a Beachy and I think he had a terrific sense of humor.

And people that knew him, said he did.

He was a handsome man.

- [Narrator] Growing up, Leo worked on the Beachy farm, plowing rocky fields and taking care of the animals.

He raised honeybees, enjoyed and studied the land around him, studied to be a teacher.

- [Maxine] He started out teaching school and he taught in quite a few schools around.

- [Narrator] And this teacher's dedication to his students would soon lead to a life in photography.

Leo Beachy felt every child should have a school picture.

- He wanted a photographer to come to the school and take pictures of his students and the photographer wouldn't do it.

- [Narrator] And so Mr.Beachy took the pictures himself.

First, his own students then children in school houses all through the hills, the hollows and homes of Western Maryland.

- This is one of Leo's cameras.

It's in such good shape.

- [Narrator] At the Grantsville museum, Earleena Tressler oversees the Beachy collection.

Inside Leo's photographs show his love of children.

And this book from 1901 shows their affection in return.

- In those days they had autograph books.

- [Narrator] These poems were written by Leo students.

- [Earleena] Dear teacher, when you get old and cannot see, put on your specs and think of me.

- [Narrator] But their handsome young teacher would not grow old, he would never marry, never have children of his own.

- When he was about 16, he started with a crippling disease.

- [Narrator] Back then, doctors didn't know about multiple sclerosis.

Leo was treated for an undiagnosed illness, nothing worked.

After 10 years he stopped teaching and spent even more time taking pictures.

By his early thirties he needed a cane to walk, but it's also when Leo Beachy picked up his stride in his new life with a camera.

- [Maxine] He got around, not just in his studio.

And I really think he was probably happier when he was outside.

They say that he was so far advanced for his time.

That his pictures are so sharp and how he got the children to sit still and to smile on pictures.

- I love their expressions.

And I think Leo, what are you saying to these kids?

They're down to earth things that you see every day and his way of posing people was quite unique, I'll tell you.

- Some of it was whimsical.

There's a picture that shows a car with an owl on the hood.

Have you seen that?

- [Narrator] Albert Feldstein is an author and historian who knows the importance of Leo Beachy's work.

Knows how it preserved forever images of places long gone.

Like the old lumbering town of Davis, Maryland.

Town that no longer exists.

And look at this pizza parlor.

That's what it is now, still standing on main street.

Back in Leo Beachy's day, it was the first national bank of Grantsville.

Beachy's photos also captured the early days of the Castleman Hotel on Route 40.

- This was one of the stagecoach stops along the historic national road.

People would stop here, they would eat, maybe get new horses, stay upstairs.

And as remarkable as the pictures are, I think they're made even more wonderful when you view it within the context of the man himself.

Here's a guy who had multiple sclerosis, but nowhere do I see any evidence of self-pity.

- [Narrator] When his legs no longer worked, Leo Beachy kept going.

- And when he got too bad, his sister Kate would carry him on her back.

They bought a horse and a wagon and they would put uncle Leo in the wagon that he could go out into the field to take pictures.

(soft acoustic guitar music) - [Narrator] And he took some of the best photos in those later years, knowing his window of opportunity was coming to an end.

- Very ill, sad.

- [Narrator] Some of his final days were spent in a Sanitarium.

Too weak to take pictures, no longer behind the camera, Leo became the subject.

On this final image of his wasted body, Leo wrote a caption, the open prison.

A vague reference to his personal suffering.

One of the only times he did so.

- But he never writes about his feelings, never in all the writings.

It was always very upbeat at a time he wrote.

- [Narrator] Maxine now treasures her uncle's writings, especially one quote, she knows it by heart.

- When he said, I do not care to have my name engraved in stately halls when I'm gone.

But I would like to be remembered in the hearts of boys and girls, men and women, as one who under great difficulty strove to bring them many pictures of God's creation.

Then I shall feel that my work was worthwhile.

And I love that quote.

- [Narrator] Complications of multiple sclerosis killed Leo Beachy at age 53 and that was in 1927.

Back then nobody in the family thought much about his writings or his photography.

- [Maxine] My brothers wanted to use his studio for a chicken house.

- [Narrator] So they cleaned out the studio Uncle Leo loved so much.

And with young Maxine's help packed up his glass plate negatives and threw them away.

- [Maxine] I remember as I was about five years old, helping to carry the glass plate negatives out, dumping them on the wagon and they took them back and dumped them in the Laurel run.

- [Narrator] That little creek still flows through the Beachy property.

And a lot of water would run through these woods before Leo Beachy's negatives would surface again.

- We didn't realize there were any negatives left.

- [Narrator] But there were.

It took half a century, but Maxine would not only see uncle Leo's negatives again, she would unravel the mysterious chain of events that brought them back.

Here's what happened.

It turns out not all the glass plate negatives were dumped in the creek.

Remember Kate Beachy?

She was Leo's sister who carried him to take pictures when he was too weak to walk.

Nobody knew Kate had more of Leo's negatives in her home!

- When Aunt Kate moved away from the home place, she sold some of his negatives and cameras to a young man in Grantsville.

- [Narrator] Sometime in the 40's or 50's that man moved, but rented out his house in Grantsville, leaving the negatives, locked in a bedroom.

- Well, the people that rented the house decided they wanted the bedroom.

They took them to the town dump.

And another person came by, saw these boxes, picked them up.

- [Narrator] That was in 1959.

And the man who found the negatives at the dump, stored them in an old wash house on the property where he lived.

- Then later on he moved away.

And they were left in the wash house.

- [Narrator] And they stayed there untouched for another 20 years.

Until a man named Mr.Kaiser rented that property with the wash house.

And during a chance conversation with Maxine in 1979, he mentioned the boxes filled with negatives in the old wash house.

- [Maxine] And when I saw the writing, I knew that it was one of uncle Leo's.

- [Narrator] Maxine then asked the homeowner if she could buy the negatives.

And was told, take them they're yours 2,800 and all.

- [Maxine] And when I saw the amount of negatives that were there, I'd literally jumped up and down on Route 40.

I was, was so elated.

And this is a great one.

This is kids eating peanut butter out of the Smucker's peanut butter can.

- [Narrator] Now Maxine was on a mission, turning the priceless negatives into prints.

Over the past few decades, she's had several hundred printed, but in tiny Grantsville, Maxine didn't know of any dark rooms.

Where pictures could be processed by hand in chemical trays.

100 miles away though; Jim Burke at the University of Pittsburgh has worked with historic negatives for 30 plus years.

- It's actually in pretty good condition.

Got good detail on the shadow areas.

It's got good detail on the highlight areas.

Couldn't ask for anything nicer.

- [Narrator] In a dark room at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, Jim recently brought a few more Beachy negatives back from the past.

- Whenever you put a piece of paper into a tray of chemistry and you stand over it and you watch that image come up out of the paper.

It's- it's a magical moment.

You could almost describe the value in these kinds of negatives as being of anthropological value.

And historical value on top of whatever sorts of aesthetic value they might have.

It looks like a group of school students.

I love the outfit on what appears to be the schoolmarm little bonnet that she's wearing.

But it's like these things speak to, you know.

When you touch them, it's like you're connected to something and someone from a hundred years ago.

It's so rich in detail and anything that I can do to help to preserve them and display them, I find tremendously satisfying.

(gentle folk music) - And I think maybe as time goes on, maybe not in my lifetime, I won't see it, but I think the day will come when he will go down as a famous photographer.

- [Narrator] Maxine keeps working to make that happen.

Even though she's in her eighties.

She was part of a team that turned an old bank into the Grantsville museum, which now houses some of the Beachy collection.

And she's determined to get funding so that all the rest of her uncle's negatives will someday come to life as photographs.

- Well I think of him so much as I'm driving along and seeing the places that he took pictures of.

- [Narrator] One of uncle Leo's favorite subjects was the old stone bridge over the Castlemen river in Grantsville.

Every now and then Maxine stops by.

- Well, when I walked down there today, naturally I thought of uncle Lee.

And I've taken my grandchildren over that bridge and told them about their great uncle.

(soft guitar music) - It's not just the photographic images that can teach us the lessons.

It's the life that this man lived himself.

He knew we would die young.

He knew he would never travel that ocean to ocean highway, but he was totally selfless.

He took images that he purposely wanted to entice other people to travel that road.

- [Narrator] So Maxine keeps traveling Leo Beachy's highway and she's traveled far from the days of a little girl who helped throw her uncle's negatives in the creek out back.

- Has Maxine served her penance?

Yes.

And I think she's gone beyond that.

She's taken Leo Beachy's someplace in history where he'd never would have been able to go himself.

- In essence, she has saved the history of Grantsville and the surrounding area by saving Leo Beachy's pictures.

- I get a little bit choked up because I really think that uncle Lee is looking over my shoulder and saying, thanks Maxine.

(country music) - [Narrator] In Garrett County, Maryland farmers still work the fields that Leo Beachy also worked with his camera a century ago.

- Well, he loved taking pictures of the farm.

I have pictures of their plowing, pictures of the wheat shocks, pictures of the corn shocks.

- [Narrator] Corn is still an important crop here.

And as autumn colors the hills of Grantsville, farmers work hard and fast to combine the corn before winter.

Just like these farmers... - [Maxine] Dad built the house in 1912.

- [Narrator] Maxine Beachy Broadwater is facing a deadline too.

There are 2,800 glass plate negatives in her uncle Leo's collection.

And she's printed fewer than a fourth of them.

There are priceless images just waiting to be seen.

And all of these plates have to be cleaned, scanned, and preserved in a digital format.

- My emotion was hopefully someday, from the time I got the very first glass plate negatives, was to be able to develop them all.

- [Narrator] But Maxine is 85 now.

With time, not necessarily on her side.

- I am so shaky.

- [Narrator] Turning the fragile plates into pictures takes expertise.

Early on she turned out of state photography labs.

- [Maxine] That's the way they got their water back then.

- [Narrator] But recently Maxine connected with this man.

- We were talking about the Yost family yesterday as well.

- [Narrator] Chris Schwehr, a fine art photographer and printer.

Turns out he relocated from New York to Maxine's hometown.

- And I knew he was in photography.

And he came in the library one day.

- I walked in the door and I saw Maxine and she looked at me and she said... - you're just a guy I need to see.

- And I smiled.

And I said, Maxine, what can I do for you?

- [Narrator] Well, first they would need money.

Preserving all those negatives would take $40,000.

- I got a phone call a month later from Maxine and she said, well, I think I found the funding.

- [Narrator] It came from a local family trust established by Howard and Audrey Naylor.

The trust was intrigued by the educational implications of the collection and offered the generous grant.

- To make this available to the museum members, to the entire community, to the schools, to the libraries where you could go to a computer and sit down and pull up all 2,800 historical and artistic pictures of Garrett County.

I mean, it's not been done here before.

- [Narrator] And so in early 2009, Chris started the job by scanning every one of the plates.

And that was the easy part.

Some had held up remarkably well.

- It's a beautiful, beautiful picture.

- [Narrator] But many were in terrible shape.

- The condition?

Well, they were kept for almost a hundred years in an un-climate controlled environment.

- [Narrator] The chemical coding had deteriorated.

Some plates were scratched and dirty.

- And believe me, this is a labor intensive process to sit here and to one by one, start to remove these dust spots.

There's a scratch right here across the barn.

- [Narrator] Chris had to make corrections without destroying the integrity of the photos, working for more than a year.

During the intricate process, he spotted little secrets in Leo's pictures.

- [Chris] There are children and family members hidden in the windows of the photograph.

- [Narrator] He found detail that added historical value.

- [Chris] And if you scroll over to the mailbox in the lower corner of the picture, the identification is here.

It's Emmy Hershberger on Maple Grove farm.

And it's number 83, clearly visible on the on the mailbox.

Blowing this up, we can place this in the county exactly who owns this place and who those children are.

- [Narrator] Chris could also follow people through their lives.

- [Chris] You begin to recognize people from one photograph to the next.

- [Narrator] Like this young man, in the back row of his school portrait.

Here again with a pretty young woman.

Chris would watch him go off to World War One.

- You come to know these people in a different way, because you're separated by a hundred years.

But after a year of looking at these pictures every day, I feel like I know the people personally.

They're my friends.

- Yeah.

It's clear, I like my dad's picture on there.

- [Narrator] With so many Beachy photos being seen for the first time older folks in town can now share their memories... - Do you have any idea who's barn this was?

- Was uncle Sam's barn.

- [Narrator] ... and help write local history before it's lost forever.

- [Mabel] That's mother, and that's dad.

That's aunt Omi, Uncle Charlie.

- [Narrator] Leo Beachy took this photo of Mabel Stanton's ancestors around 1918 before she was even born.

And at the age of 88, Mabel is seeing this beautiful image for the first time.

- It was wonderful to bring those pictures to life.

Well, I think he was an artist just as much as a photographer.

- I think it opens a new window, a new world to me, especially.

- [Narrator] There's also a new connection for this man; between a Beachy photo and this old uniform found in his grandmother's attic.

Top row, second from the left, stands his grandfather.

- I was only two years old when he died.

Nobody had ever told me he played on a ball team.

- [Narrator] Jerry Beachy is a distant relative of Leo Beachy.

He's thankful for the photo that put his grandfather's face on an old piece of cloth.

- It means a lot to me that I can be this close to him.

- Leo Beachy, photographed a quarter of the 20th century in this County.

From 1905 to 1927 there is literally a one man photographic record of the history of this county.

- [Narrator] And Garrett County couldn't be prouder.

Part of the project involved getting the Beachy collection on the Garrett County historical society website.

- And this particular photograph is, is Maxine Broadwater's family.

- [Narrator] Where people can buy photos or study Leo's pictorial history of life in Maryland, Pennsylvania, West Virginia.

- There are people now looking at the Garrett County historical website from a list of countries as long as my arm.

Russia, Japan, New Zealand, Portugal, Poland, Brazil, Greece, India.

- [Narrator] Places Leo Beachy dreamed of, but never got to see during a life cut short by multiple sclerosis.

- He said in his writings, that every time he looked out the studio window, he saw pictures that he had never seen before.

There's a picture of uncle Lee standing on the hillside.

And I imagine he's thinking beautiful thoughts of nature cause he loved nature!

And I think that's proven by the pictures that he has taken.

- [Narrator] Children still play in the fields where Leo Beachy once took their photos.

The view is still magnificent and Leo's niece, Maxine is still working on his legacy.

She's collected a thousand postcards from the early 20th century, all created by Leo Beachy.

There are no negatives for the postcards.

They have to be scanned.

Maxine is determined to have that done too.

- The Leo Beachy collection, couldn't have a better steward for all these years.

She has taken care of, with dogged persistence, this collection.

- I'm just very proud of the work that he did.

- [Narrator] Maybe she's relaxing just a bit these days.

Enjoying her beloved Garrett County.

Finally enjoying the photos that almost never were.

- [Maxine] It wasn't just a piece of glass anymore.

I was actually holding the picture.

And it's a dream of mine that I just never thought I would see.

- [Narrator] Her dream was for the world to have Leo Beachy's photos.

But the irony, is Maxine won't have them for long.

Macular degeneration is stealing her eyesight.

Looking at uncle Leo's photos now means more than ever.

- I know the day will come when I won't be able to see the picture.

So I try to look at them just as much as I can and know that I have to keep that vision in my mind.

I'm thankful that I've had 85 years of being able to see, and I have a lot to be thankful for.

- [Narrator] Especially thankful she finished her mission.

And through these photographs, Leo Beachy's legacy lives on.

- [Maxine] So I'm trying to cherish every moment of it.

(soft guitar music)