Seated from left are Bluffton cousins, no doubt fluent in the local Swiss dialect, Jake Lehman, C.C. Hofstetter and David Moser.
It’s the classic and serious pose of the 1890s. Three young men; two looking straight at the camera and one gazing off into the future.
These three gathered for what may be their first-ever formal photograph. We do not know the occasion for the photograph. We can speculate that the photographer was Samuel U. Amstutz. It appears as if the background is a light-color sheet.
Dressed in the style of the day, fresh from the barber with a trim and a shave, each wears a pocket watch and fob, pocket square, and vest suit jacket with lapels.
We are unable to correctly count the suit buttons, but our thought is these suits are hand-sewn. We can only speculate on the suit colors, and the actual number of times these suits were worn. (They certainly were not worn around the farm.)
Click here, as we found Mr. Hofstetter in another photo, taken in 1914, while he attended an Amstutz reunion.