Oldest Photo — Huntingdon County Information Page

Did you know? One of the oldest surviving photographs taken in the United States was made by a man born in Huntingdon.

Joseph Saxton was born here on March 22, 1799, and went to work at twelve as an apprentice to a watchmaker.

In the fall of 1839, when the daguerreotype was only months old, he pointed one out the window of his office at the Philadelphia Mint and caught the cupola of Central High School and part of the State Armory building. Accounts put the day at either around September 25 or October 16. The first mention of the picture in print came on October 24, 1839, in the United States Gazette.

He spent the rest of his working life in government service. He ran the making of machinery at the Mint, then served as its curator of weights and measures, and from 1843 until he died he was superintendent of weights and measures for the United States Coast Survey.

A watchmaker's apprentice from Huntingdon made one of the oldest pictures this country still has of itself.

From the record

Passages about this subject, quoted from county histories now in the public domain. Each one names the book and the position in the text so it can be checked. Spelling is as printed.

It is regularly laid out and contains about 120 dwellings, a court-house and a jail. A court of common pleas and general quarter sessions is held here the second Monday In January, April, August and November. It is 150 miles W.N.W. of Philadelphia." By the act of incorporation the first borough officers were named as follows : Joseph Cc^ill, chief burgess ; George McClellan, burgess ; Robert Patterson and Michael Foncannon, burgesses' assistants; James Robertson, town clerk ; Jeremiah Daily, high constable. It was further provided that these officers should serve until the first Monday in May, 1796, when the first borough election should be held. A supplementary act, approved by Governor Snyder on February 6, 181 1, provided for the election, "on the Friday next preceding the third Saturday of March next, and on the same day in every year hereafter," of a chief burgess, an assistant burgess, five reputable citizens to be a town council, and one reputable citizen to be a high constable.John W. Jordan, ed., History of the Juniata Valley and Its People (New York: Lewis Historical Publishing, 1913) · character 337,167 of the scanned text

What the fact check changed. SUBSTANTIALLY TRUE. The core claim survives intact and, importantly, the original used the source's own hedge without upgrading it. "One of the oldest surviving photographs ever taken in America" matches "one of the oldest surviving photographs taken in the United States" almost word for word. That is the right way to carry a claim like this and it did not need touching. ONE CLAIM CUT: "he went on to build instruments for the U.S. Mint and the Smithsonian." The Mint half is documented. The SMITHSONIAN half the check could not source. What IS documented is the Coast Survey post, held from 1843 to his death, so the sentence now carries the sourced job instead of the unsourced one. If a later tick gets into the Smithsonian Archives, this can go back in. ONE LINE SOFTENED: "A kid from Huntingdon helped invent how a nation would remember itself" reads as though Saxton had a hand in inventing photography. He did not. He made one of the earliest surviving American examples of it, months after Daguerre's process was announced. Rewritten to say exactly that. DETAIL ADDED, and the hedge kept: the sources disagree on the day, giving either around September 25 or October 16, 1839. The post carries both, the way the source does. The October 24, 1839 United States Gazette notice is a firm date and is the earliest printed reference to the photograph. SOURCING NOTE: Wikipedia was the lead. Every claim above traces to a named published citation on that article: Rung (1940), Stapp (1983), and Hannavy's Encyclopedia of Nineteenth-Century Photography (2008). DUPLICATE: fact_id 6e7d37b375a9c0ce is the same post, same correction.

Sources

Joseph Saxton (Wikipedia article, used as lead; underlying citations named below) (2026)

Checked 2026-08-01 · County history, independently fact checked

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