Biography provided by the Patrick Montgomery Collection (Archive Farms)
 
Seneca Ray Stoddard (1844–1917) was an American landscape photographer known for his photographs of New York's Adirondack Mountains. He was also a naturalist, a writer, a poet, an artist, and a cartographer. Born in Saratoga County, New York, he learned photography at age 20, initially in Glens Falls, and was soon traveling throughout the Adirondacks, using his photographs in a series of guidebooks he produced about the region. His best known one, The Adirondacks: Illustrated, was first published in 1873. In 1878, Stoddard produced a topographical survey of the Adirondacks and in early 1892, he was invited to give an illustrated lecture to the New York State Legislature that was influential in the creation of the Adirondack Park. He then began traveling extensively: to Alaska, Florida and Cuba in 1894 followed by the American west and southwest. The next year he traveled to Bermuda, the Holy Lands, Italy, Switzerland, and France and 1897, he went to England and the Orkney, Shetland and Faroe Islands, Iceland, Norway, Denmark, Germany and Russia. His trips became the basis for illustrated lecture tours, and photographic travel books. Stoddard's archive of photographs is now held in two large collections at the Chapman Historical Museum in Glens Falls, NY, and at the Adirondack Museum in Blue Mountain Lake, NY.