After a series of tragedies in which Horatio Spafford's law firm suffered severe physical and financial damage in the
Great Fire of Chicago of 1871, and the Spaffords lost their 4 daughters at sea when the liner, on which Anna was travelling to Europe, collided with another vessel, they moved to Jerusalem with a group of Americans who shared their religious beliefs. There, they established a religious colony, whose purpose of its members was not to convert non-Christians, but to live and worship together whilst undertaking charitable work in the Palestinian community for all faiths. Towards the end of the century there was an influx of Americans and Swedes into the community and to finance their work they tapped into the burgeoning tourist industry in Jerusalem, not only opening a hostel and souvenir shop for travellers but also a photography department. Gastgifvar Eric Matson (June 16, 1888 – December 1977) was born in the
Nås parish of
Dalarna, Sweden. In 1896, the Matson family together with a group of their
Nås countrymen moved to Jerusalem and joined the American Colony. In 1898, Elijah Meyers, who had emigrated from India to Jerusalem in the 1890s and was a Jewish convert to Christianity, used his photographic knowledge gained in Bombay and London to found the American Colony Photo Department. Meyers trained the next generation of photographers,
Lewis Larsson, who headed the photo operation between 1903 and 1933, These photographers together with photographic assistants, lab technicians and hand-tinting artists were responsible for taking, developing, printing and hand tinting prints, and producing thematic photograph albums, stereographs, panoramic photos, postcards, and glass lantern slides. These were sold in the Colony's store near
Jaffa Gate and also to newspapers, periodicals (between 1913 and 1940 a series of
National Geographic articles on the Middle East were published that featured American Colony images by Matson and Larsson), and were included in travel books. From 1934, when the Swedish and American sides of the Colony split, until 1940 when the department was renamed The Matson Photo Service, the Matsons managed the photography business with G. Eric Matson taking the photographs and his wife running the production side. The Matsons, along with other employees, continued the business, that had relocated to the lower end of Jaffa Street, until the unrest in
Palestine led them to move to the United States. They settled in
Southern California and had the bulk of the photo service's negatives, which included the archive of the American Colony Photo Department, shipped to them. The Jerusalem side of the business carried on for a while but, after the store and offices suffered severe damage during the conflict of 1948–9 and the consequential decline of the tourist industry, it closed in the early 1950s. The Matsons continued to sell photographs from California. == Legacy ==