From the Archives: R.C. Leavenworth shot hundreds of thousands of images in Lansing

"Anything photographed. Anytime. Anywhere."

That was the slogan painted on the company car driven by R.C. Leavenworth.

Russell "R.C." Leavenworth's photography career began in the lumber camps and mining towns of the Upper Peninsula. 

He came to Lansing in 1919, in time to document the city’s transformation into a major industrial city and automotive capital.

Leavenworth opened his commercial photography business at 1315 W. Michigan Ave., in Lansing and did both interior and exterior commercial photography.

He later began to take graduation class photos, livestock and poultry photography.

Leavenworth would photograph assembly lines, a Ku Klux Klan rally, the Reo Motor Car Co. sit-down strike, the Bath School disaster, parades, publicity events and the construction of almost every significant building that went up in the city in the 1920s and '30s.

When the Hotel Olds opened in 1926, Leavenworth was the official photographer of the hotel, interior and exterior.

Leavenworth Photography shot hundreds of thousands of images that tell the story of industry, business and social life in Michigan’s capital city.

He created one of the largest collections of Oldsmobile photographs, which is now permanently housed at the Archives of Michigan. His studio handled thousands of prints daily for automobile company clients.

In early 1931, the State Journal noted that nearly all pictures appearing in the newspaper, with the exception of portraits, were taken by Leavenworth studios.

When Leavenworth and his wife, Mildred, went on a world cruise pleasure trip in 1932, he took with him a special German camera with a delicate mechanism that would record the tiniest details on a small negative.

The trip took them to the Panama Canal, Cuba, Spain, France, Greece, Italy, the Holy Land, Ceylon, Java, the Philippines, China and Japan.

Leavenworth took photographs and mailed them back to the State Journal. One showed a sand bag entrenchment near Shanghai, thrown up by the Chinese in an attempt to stand off the Japanese during the Sino-Japanese war.

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In a letter, Leavenworth said the visit to the war zone was arranged for the 248 passengers taking the world cruise only after great difficulty. He said the Japanese commander "absolutely refused to permit the trip, but by persistence and appealing to higher officials, the visit was arranged."

He died in May of 1935 at age 54, following a long illness.

The legacy of Leavenworth and the company that passed to his son-in-law, Hiram Marple, and later to an employee-turned-partner named Roger Boettcher is a collection of more than 200,000 negatives.

Boettcher went to work for Leavenworth Photographics in 1956. He  became a partner with Marple six years later and took over the business after Marple's death in 1987.

A substantial portion of the Leavenworth collection is housed at the Archives of Michigan.

Contact Vickki Dozier at (517) 267-1342 or vdozier@lsj.com. Follow her on Twitter @vickkiD.