For most of the inhabitants of the small village of Norfolk in northwestern Connecticut, the blizzard of March 1888 was a disastrous occurrence. For Marie Kendall, a photographer who lived in the town, it was a chance to take uncommonly dramatic pictures. During the three days of the storm, she hauled her clumsy box camera, tripod, and glass plates from one end of the village to the other, recording the wild and frigid scene.

Kendall photographed the stranded railroad train and the teams of workers struggling to shovel the tracks, and she was there to record the arrival of the first locomotive when it finally got through. She climbed the church steeple for bird’s-eye views, and she got a picture of a building buried under snow with only its flagpole showing. Her photographs of bowler-topped heads barely visible above white drifts are almost surrealist to a modern eye.

Marie Kendall’s relationship with Norfolk began when her physician husband, John C. Kendall, moved his practice there in 1884. The two had met in New York City’s Bellevue Hospital, where Marie Hartig, the French-born daughter of Franco-Prussian War refugees, was one of the first students to attend the newly founded nursing school. Dr. Kendall was then finishing his medical residency. The couple became engaged before her graduation from Bellevue, and she was promptly dismissed by the school. Determined to become a nurse, she completed her training at nearby Charity Hospital.

Marie shocked her parents by rejecting the customary church wedding, marrying Kendall in a civil ceremony in 1878 instead. Furthermore, she refused a wedding ring because she felt it was a symbol of women’s enslavement. A watch would be more suitable, she said. But she was not a consistent rebel: she signed all her photographs “Mrs. J. C. Kendall.”

The Connecticut village the Kendalls moved to was surrounded by uninhabited forests and clear lakes. Norfolk’s high altitude in the remote northwest corner of the state made it a summer haven for rich industrialists from Hartford and New Haven. The railroad deposited visitors directly on the town green, and fashionable vacationers soon established summer residences there, hiring architects as eminent as Stanford White to design their houses.

It was a time when most prosperous families kept albums of photographs in their drawing rooms, and though there were few female photographers in America in the 1880s, Marie Kendall apparently saw the profession as a way to supplement her husband’s small income. To raise money to buy her first camera, Kendall knitted and sewed garments to sell, using skills she had been taught as a child in Europe.

Because she was neither a native nor a summer resident, Kendall’s perspective as an outsider in Norfolk may have enhanced her appreciation of the town. After teaching herself to use her new camera and setting up a darkroom, she threw herself into the business of making