Excavations at Camp Nelson in central Kentucky have revealed the remnants of a 150-year-old photography studio—which was once part of a Union camp—the first ever found at Civil War site.
Among the many items discovered by researcher Stephen McBride and his team were several broken glass bottles that once contained hair dye, the Lexington Herald-Leader reported.
The researchers from Transylvania University in Lexington initially thought that the bottles were used to hold medicine. However, when the team started putting the pieces of glass back together they noticed some featured embossed lettering, with names such as "Bear's Oil," "Christadoro" and "Dr. Jaynes."
The Bear's Oil product was probably used like modern-day hair gel or wax to shape hair. However, the Christadoro and Dr. Jaynes products turned out to be hair dye brands.
"We found a lot of them. It's something you just don't find on other sites," McBride told the Herald-Leader. "The dye is interesting. It suggested that people were fixing up their hair before they had their photograph taken. So people may have actually been darkening their hair to look better in the photo."
He suggests the reason behind this decision was that soldiers may have wanted to correct one peculiarity of early photography.
"One of the things the photographic books mention is if you had light-colored or blonde hair, the black and white photography process could make you look like you had white hair or gray hair," McBride said.
Camp Nelson was founded in June 1863 as a U.S. Army Supply Depot in Jessamine County. At the peak of its use around two years later, the camp extended across 4,000 acres and housed up to 8,000 soldiers.
Designated as a National Monument in October 2018, Camp Nelson housed more than 300 buildings and tents, which included a recruitment center, prison, hospital, barracks, sawmill, slaughterhouse, woodworking shops and other services, according to the National Park Service (NPS).
The army also allowed private merchants to set up shop at the camp. These businesses included taverns, a post office, a boot shop, fruit and vegetable stands and the photography studio—the existence of which is indicated by the discovery of several photographic artifacts.
"I think it's a really exciting find," Bob Zeller, Director of the Center for Civil War Photography, told the Herald-Leader.