About 10 years ago, Fort Dodge native Joe Kudron went to the Webster County Historical Society wanting to do some research on the former Illinois Central Railroad. The Illinois Central, now the Canadian National Railway, passed through Fort Dodge. More importantly for Kudron, his father worked for that railroad.

“I was after all the train pictures,” said Kudron, who now lives in Boone.

He was shown the society’s collection of some 12,000 photographic negatives that came from the former Harold Bergeman photo studio in Fort Dodge.

He set out to digitize the railroad photo negatives. But fearing the collection might some day be disposed of, he started scanning in all of the negatives.

-Messenger photo by Bill Shea
Fort Dodge historian Roger Natte, left, visits with Joe Kudron Monday morning while Kudron scans in negatives from the Webster County Historical Society’s collection of the work of local photographer Harold Bergeman.

“I’ll be doing this until I die,” Kudron joked Monday morning in between scanning negatives.

“I’m never going to get them done,” he added.

Since 2014, he has been coming to the Historical Society’s room in the Fort Dodge Public Library on a regular basis with a laptop, scanner, portable light box and hard drive.

He can’t estimate how many megabytes worth of negatives he has scanned into the hard drive.

“It’s out of control,” he said.

-Messenger photo by Bill Shea
Joe Kudron was working in the Webster County Historical Society room at the Fort Dodge Public Library Monday morning to scan in negatives from the society collection of the work of local photographer Harold Bergeman.

His work has provided a valuable backup for the collection, which is stored in cardboard boxes.

But he has also posted the images online, allowing people to see them for perhaps the first time. They have been posted on the Historical Society’s Facebook page and the Fort Dodge Iowa Memories, Stories and Photos Facebook page.

The posts have proven to be popular.

“I was shocked at all the responses coming back,” Kudron said.

The negatives are stored in boxes marked with the years that the photos were taken, but nothing on the boxes indicates the subjects of the photos.

“You never know what you’re going to find,” he said.

One of the negatives he scanned Monday morning was of a tree-planting ceremony held at First Presbyterian Church in 1970. Previously, he found a negative of his junior high school track team photo.

And he has also found train photos. One of them shows a steam locomotive hauling a passenger train called The Hawkeye out of Fort Dodge in the late 1940s, a time when steam locomotives were rapidly being replaced by diesel-powered versions. Kudron found a shot of a 1952 circus train, and one of the connection of the Illinois Central and Fort Dodge, Des Moines and Southern railroads east of Fort Dodge.

Fort Dodge historian Roger Natte said all the negatives came from the Bergeman photo studio, which was in business from 1944 to 1985. He said studio owner Harold Bergeman did a lot of commercial and community photography in addition to the usual portraits and wedding photos

The Historical Society was given all the negatives after the photo studio closed.

“He said you can have the whole works,” Natte said.

He said the negatives for the portraits and wedding photos were given to the families, and the society kept the rest.

Kudron, who worked for the Chicago Northwestern and later, Union Pacific, railroads from 1979 to 2013, took many train photos himself. He said he used to make duplicate prints of the train photos he took. He put the duplicates in plastic bags and whenever he saw rail fans watching his train, he would throw the bags out of the locomotives to them.