Vintage Photo Print - Richmond - Lumpers at the T.B. Williams, 1899

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The record places these lumpers at the T.B. Williams site in Richmond in 1899, so the men were working the waterfront itself rather than posing in a studio. Lumpers were casual laborers hired by the job to load and unload cargo, and in late nineteenth-century Richmond that work was tied to the James River trade in tobacco, flour and other goods moving between the city and ships. Photographs of working crews like this one are valuable because ordinary dock laborers were rarely the subject of formal portraits. Look closely at how the men are arranged and what surrounds them, since both reveal something about the labor and the goods they handled.

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