Mary Edith "Mollie" Fly
Born
Mary Edith McKie

c. 1847
Died1925
Occupation(s)Photographer, boarding house owner
Years active1879–1912
Spouse(s)Samuel D. Goodrich (before 1879)
Camillus "Buck" Sydney Fly (1879–1901)
ChildrenKitty Fly (adopted)

Mary Edith Fly (c. 1847–1925) was a late 19th and early 20th century American photographer who co-founded and managed Fly's Photography Gallery in Tombstone, Arizona, with her husband, photographer C.S. "Buck" Fry. She ran the studio alone after his death in 1901. There were few women photographers in this period, and her contributions were recognized in 1989 when she was inducted into the Arizona Women's Hall of Fame.

Personal life

Mary Edith McKie, known as Mollie, was born in about 1847. In the late 1850's her family moved to San Francisco.[1] Little else is known about her early life, and nothing is known about how she got her photographic training.[2]

She married twice, first to Samuel D. Goodrich whom she divorced after two years.[1] In 1879, in San Fransicso, she married photographer Camillus Sidney "Buck" Fly in San Francisco. The couple later adopted a daughter, Kitty Fry.[3]

Photographic career

The Flys moved to the boomtown of Tombstone in Arizona Territory in 1879 and set up a photographic studio.[4] Initially it was housed in a tent, but by mid-1880 they had built a 12-room boarding house on Fremont Street – their "Fly's Photography Gallery" was in the back of the premises.[3] In 1881, the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral took place in a lot next to the boarding house, and Ike Clanton escaped through the boarding house during the gunfight.[5]

Fly's Photography Gallery (before 1912). A modern reconstruction exists today in Tombstone.
Photographic postcard by Mollie Fly, captioned "Arizona Prospectors, Tombstone", n.d. (before 1912). A rare example of her work.

Buck was often gone on photographic expeditions, and during his absence Mollie ran both the boarding house and Fly's Photography Gallery, taking studio portraits for 35 cents apiece.[3] It is not known how many photographs she took because almost all the known images from Fly's Photography Gallery are credited to her husband.[2] There are a couple of extant postcards of street scenes credited to her.[4][6]

Buck Fry became a heavy drinker, and Mollie separated from him for a time in 1887.[3] By the late 1880s, Tombstone was suffering from a declining economy, so the Flys moved to Phoenix in 1893. There they opened a new photography studio.[2] This business failed and they returned to Tombstone a year later.[2]

The Flys separated again in the late 1890s, at which time Buck opened a studio in the copper-mining town of Bisbee, Arizona.[2][3] Here the Flys suffered the first of two fires that would destroy a large portion of their collection of glass-plate negatives; in this case, the negatives lost were in storage at the Phelps Dodge Mercantile Company warehouse.[7]

While Buck was in Bisbee, Mollie Fry ran the Tombstone studio on her own, continuing to do so for another decade after Buck's death in Bisbee in 1901.[2][3][8] In 1905, she published a collection of Buck's photographs entitled Scenes in Geronimo’s Camp: The Apache Outlaw and Murderer.[4]

The Fly photography studio burning in July 1915. Photograph by Mollie Fly.

Mollie Fly retired in 1912, but three years later a fire destroyed her studio.[9] She then moved to Los Angeles, where she died in 1925. Many of the Flys' negatives had been destroyed in the two fires, but Fly donated her remaining collection of photographic negatives to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.[3]

  • Fly is a character in Romain Wilhelmsen's 1999 novel Buckskin and Satin.
  • Fly is a character in Margaret Mater's 2009 novel What Might Have Been.

References

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Mollie Fly.
  1. 1 2 Blanton, Heather Frey (2014). "Mollie Fly – The Woman at the OK Corral". Accessed May 3, 2016.
  2. 1 2 3 4 5 6 Vaughan, Thomas. "C.S. Fly Pioneer Photojournalist". The Journal of Arizona History (Autumn, 1989 ed.) 30 (3): 303–318.
  3. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 "Mary “Mollie” E. Fly (1847–1925)". Arizona Women's Hall of Fame website. Accessed May 3, 2016.
  4. 1 2 3 Eppinga, Jane. Tombstone. Arcadia Publishing, 2003, p. 54.
  5. ↑ Douglas Linder (2005). "Testimony of Ike Clanton in the Preliminary Hearing in the Earp–Holliday Case". Famous Trials: The O.K. Corral Trial. Accessed May 3, 2016.
  6. ↑ Eppinga, Jane. Around Tombstone: Ghost Towns and Gunfights. Arcadia Publishing, 2009, p. 46.
  7. ↑ Trimble, Marshall. "Why do we have so few photos of Tombstone from the Fly studio?". May 15, 2010. Accessed May 3, 2016.
  8. ↑ Shillingberg, William B. Tombstone, A.T.: A History of Early Mining, Milling, and Mayhem, p. 364.
  9. ↑ "Fly’s Photography Gallery Burns to the Ground". Keeping The Peace: Tales from the Old West, March 25, 2016. (Includes reproduction of the front page of the Tombstone Epitaph of Sunday, July 4, 1915, featuring Fly's photo of the building on fire.)
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