Same Person, Different Pictures?

Sometimes, I look at pictures and see resemblances, then jump to conclusions hastily. I’ve really had to learn to restrain myself. But this time, I can’t help myself: I think these two photographic subjects are of such close relationship as to be one and the same person.

Of course, though I know their photographs come from the collection of Edna Tully McCaughey, and at least have a slim chance of being related to our Tully family, I don’t know enough about the studio or city to form any opinion as to who this subject might be.

Actually, I don’t know a thing about Pullman, Illinois. For starters, I don’t have any other Tully relatives in my database hailing from that location, so I’ve never researched it. Then, I’ve never met anyone else who comes from that town, so I have absolutely no frame of reference. Except…

There is this one thing. Pullman, huh? Sounds vaguely familiar—like railroad era heritage. And that is exactly what it is. A town designed to be a model planned community for the employees of the Pullman company—which, upon Pullman’s demise, was annexed to the City of Chicago.

And here I was thinking Pullman, Illinois, would be somewhere miles away in the cornfields of the “Prairie State.”

As for the mystery lady of today’s post, she had her likeness taken at the studio of Thomas S. Johnson, who, I learned from comments to an entry by Flick member “What’s That Picture," may have been Pullman’s first part-time photographer. The time frame may have been mid to late 1880s for these poses.

The only thing I can conclude thus far, then, is that somewhere south of the south Chicago where the Tully family and relatives lived, this young lady lived and benefited from the well-planned neighborhood in which her father most certainly must have worked.