Andrew Joseph Russell was a 19th-century American photographer of the Civil War and the Union Pacific Railroad.

Russell was born in New Hampshire in 1829 but raised in New York City. He began his training as a painter before the Civil War. There, he was assigned to the United States Military Railroad Construction Corps, partly because his family had a canal and railroad construction history. In that role, he photographed primarily transportation subjects for the Union. Still, he was responsible for a few photographs of more historical and graphical interest, which were later sold to and distributed by the Mathew Brady Studios.

One more famous photo was “Confederate dead Behind the Stone Wall” after the Battle of Chancellorsville, Virginia, which occurred in May 1863. After the end of the Civil War, Russell was commissioned by the Union Pacific Railroad to take photographs of the eastern portion of the building of the route moved west from Nebraska toward Promontory Point in Utah. He is most famous for his “Joining of the Rails” image of the laying of the Golden Spike at Promontory Point, Utah, but he also took several photographs of the American West. After 1870, Russell returned to  New York, where he became the world’s first photojournalist, working for Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper until the early 1890s.

 

©Kathy Alexander/Legends of America, updated March 2025.