The Middle-Aged Man and the Sea:
William H. Harbeck and the Story of his Story

William H. Harbeck was born in Ohio in in the 1860s; records vary, but this was sometime between 1863 and 1868. Not much is known about his early life, though he grew up in the Toledo area, home to the extended Harbeck family, and on February 16, 1886, married wife Catherine. The couple settled down and started a family – son John was born in 1887, while another, Stanley, was born in 1892. To judge from the Toledo city directories, young Harbeck had trouble finding his niche, moving from job to job with surprising regularity. This included stints running a laundry, working on the city police force and serving as a bookkeeper and travel agent, among other professions.^[1]

Sometime before 1900 William Harbeck made yet another change, this time going into journalism, despite lacking any formal education or training. He also left the family behind to do so, moving to Anaconda, Colorado, and supporting them from afar. This newspaper gig only lasted about a year but, interestingly, when it was done, Harbeck didn’t return to Toledo, choosing instead to continue living and working on the road, coming home to visit the family only on occasion. While everyone else stayed in Ohio, Harbeck kept right on moving, all the way out to the coast.

These travels eventually brought him to the Pacific Northwest – by late 1903 William Harbeck was running a film supply business at 220 James Street in Seattle. According to an ad in the Daily Times, he catered to local entertainment houses by selling and repairing projection equipment, though he also offered a training service for aspiring projectionists and claimed he could color film prints.^[2] (At the time color could be added to motion pictures through the painstaking process of hand-painting each individual frame.)

And yet, despite nearing age 40, Harbeck was still casting about for his place. By 1904 he gave up the film supply business and resettled in Tacoma, where he looked to open a small moving picture theatre. He advertised for a partner, offering to manage the business on a day-to-day basis if he could find someone with $1,800 in seed money. Though he figured such a venue could clear $700 per month, Harbeck never found his angel investor.^[3] Instead, he became manager of the Orpheum Theatre, a job didn’t last much longer than any of his previous ones. In the 1906 Tacoma city directory, shortly before he moved back to Seattle, he’s listed as a photographer, though it’s probably more accurate to say that he had already begun working as a motion picture cameraman. It would take a while before the local Polk directory made those kinds of distinctions.

Though new to the business, in that same year, William Harbeck got his big break. He was acquainted with the Miles Brothers, former showmen in Seattle whom he got to know through his film supply business. They were no longer based in the Northwest, having relocated to California, but appear to have hired William Harbeck to do occasional camera work. And in 1906, one of those assignments just happened put him in the right place at the right time, so to speak: when the San Francisco earthquake and fire struck on April 18^th, Harbeck was there, contracted to shoot another subject. In the aftermath he quickly grabbed his camera, grinding out some of the earliest moving picture footage of the devastation, later marketing the resulting film. “Moving picture showing Frisco burning, taken from Alamo park April 18,” he advertised in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer within weeks. “Only one in existence. See the people run and flames curl skyward. Greatest picture ever made. Send 10 cents for sample. Agent wanted in every town.”^[4]

In a flash, with this one short film, William Harbeck’s days of professional drifting came to an end. The San Francisco footage put him on the map and played a big role in helping him land additional freelance camera assignments. Later that year Harbeck was hired by the Selig Polyscope Company out of Chicago to shoot films in Yellowstone Park, for example, after which they sent him down to Mexico. He also began shooting rail and trolley scenes for Hale’s Tours, the simulated train ride that employed motion pictures as part of the amusement, a job he may have also landed through his connection to the Selig Company. One of Harbeck’s few surviving films, in fact, is a scene he shot in 1907 from the front of a trolley on Cordova Street in Vancouver, British Columbia, which may have taken as part of a Hale’s assignment.^[5]

That same year William Harbeck landed his most significant client, contracting to shoot pictures for the Canadian Pacific Railway. They were looking for a cameraman to travel the company’s various routes, filming as the train moved through parts of western Canada. These films, which were distributed to nickelodeon theatres, not only advertised the company but were also shown to passengers along their routes as a form of entertainment. And yet, at the same time, Harbeck was supplementing his commercial work with projects of his own undertaking, shooting in various places around the Northwest and selling that footage on the open market, similar to what independent newsreel cameramen would be doing a few years later. He was also active in the local film scene, becoming a founding member of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE) Local No. 154, the operator’s union, which was chartered in Seattle on September 1, 1908.

Most of William Harbeck’s output to this point (commercial or otherwise) was documentary in nature, but he didn’t limit himself to that genre. He reportedly staged a reenactment of the 1908 Jack Johnson-Tommy Burns heavyweight title fight, using stand-ins for the actual boxers, which he shot in the original Dugdale Park, home of the Seattle Siwashes of the Northwestern Baseball League.^[6] Later, in 1909, he placed an ad in the Seattle Daily Times looking for a partner to help him market “the Ladies, Remove Your Hats film seen in local theatres.”^[7] It’s not clear what Harbeck was referring to, but this appears to have been a comic short he created for Seattle-area nickelodeons – literally, the “silence your cell phone” announcement of its day.

As William Harbeck continued his camera work in 1909 and 1910, his reputation grew both locally and nationally. In September 1909 he was hired by the Orpheum vaudeville circuit to film President William Howard Taft’s visit to the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition in Seattle, where he pulled double duty by simultaneously shooting films for the Canadian Pacific Railway.^[8] In late 1910 he went farther afoot, traveling to New York and then Europe, both to conduct business for Canadian Pacific and to explore wider distribution for his side projects, which were growing more ambitious in scope. After returning to the Northwest in the spring of 1911, for example, he brought three of his creations to Seattle’s Alhambra Theatre on June 29^th, followed by a similar exhibition at the Dream Theatre a few days later.^[9] Narrating the action from the side of the screen, these Harbeck pictures included a film documenting the Washington state lumber industry, along with two Canadian travelogue subjects. A short while later he took pictures of the 1911 Potlatch celebration in Seattle, which were eventually shown at the Coliseum Theatre, located at Third and James.^[10]

William Harbeck was coming into his own as a filmmaker, discovering that movies of people, places and things had significant value for early movie audiences. So, after finalizing local distribution of his Potlatch film, in the summer of 1911 he went northward to Alaska. There he traveled with Dr. L.M. Slocum, spending several weeks on location taking footage of, among other things, Miles Glacier cleaving into the Copper River, plus mining and oil refinery operations in the area.^[11] Harbeck didn’t rest when he got back, either, heading down to Oregon so he could film rodeo scenes at the 1911 Pendleton Round Up.

William Harbeck’s time in Alaska represented his most ambitious project to date. He was not alone in capturing its majesty – Seattle-based cameraman Beverly B. Dobbs was in the process of marketing his own Alaskan feature, for example, something Harbeck was undoubtedly aware of. With competition at hand, Harbeck was determined to get a big bang out of his own picture, so in early 1912 took it to New York City, embarking on an East Coast and European tour like he had the previous year. In New York he rented out the Eden Musee on February 7^th, pulling out all the stops in what was essentially a sneak preview – a one-day screening designed to engage distributors and the trade papers in his latest offering. Like the Alhambra engagement, Harbeck lectured from aside the screen as his Alaska film was shown two times that day. “…Mr. Harbeck’s remarks on Alaska were intensely interesting, and the films shown, of exceptional beauty and true to life,” said Moving Picture News.^[12] The picture itself wasn’t described in detail, but some of his advertising played on the fact that monied business interests were quietly battling for control over Alaska’s natural resources. Other parts of the film, however, were in the scenery vein, an appear to have been similar to the films he was making for the Canadian Pacific Railway.

The Eden Musee engagement was a one-off, but William Harbeck got no fewer than three write-ups in the national trade papers – notices he could use to line up potential distributors. Not only was the preview covered in Moving Picture News, but the paper ran an interview with Harbeck in the following week’s edition where he described his shooting process. His Alaskan pictures were taken in July and August of 1911, he said, then developed in his home laboratory back in Seattle. Though he continued working for the Canadian Pacific Railway, Harbeck wanted to do even more of his own location shooting as well as grow his distribution network in the East as well as in Europe.^[13] To that end, an annual trip would become part of his sales routine: he would shoot new subjects for most of the year, then would take an extended winter trip to negotiate distribution of those pictures.

William Harbeck’s Alaska pictures also got a nice write-up in Moving Picture World, which made them a focal point in their educational column on February 17, 1912. The paper was more descriptive about what Harbeck was showing, and was particularly taken with the film’s opening sequence. Here the cameraman employed some “trick” photography – in this case, an animated sequence showing a map of Alaska where the names of certain cities, rivers and railroads materialized onscreen, perfectly synchronized with Harbeck’s talking points. “The navigable portions of the rivers and bays were illustrated by forms representing vessels,” the trade paper noted of one effect, “a novel idea and one that can be used to great advantage in the preparation of educational films.”^[14] It isn’t known how William Harbeck accomplished this feature, though he probably had assistance pulling the effect together.

Reaction to the Eden Musee screenings suggested that William Harbeck’s Alaska film could be his biggest yet, and to that end Moving Picture World noted his intention of taking the picture to Washington, D.C., where it could be shown to prominent lawmakers.

That, however, would never happen.

By Eric L. Flom – November 2025

Notes:

[1] See various editions of the Toledo city directories between 1885 and 1900. See also “More Relatives of Toledo People on the Lost Liner,” Toledo Daily Blade, April 17, 1912, and “W.H. Harbeck’s Body is Among Those Found,” Toledo Daily Blade, April 23, 1912 (clippings from Photographer Reference File [Harbeck, W.H.], University of Washington Special Collections Division.
[2] “Motion picture machines…” classified advertisement, Seattle Daily Times, 18 October 1903, Page 22.
[3] See “Want lady partner…,” classified advertisement, Seattle Daily Times, 5 May 1904, Page 12; and “Who wants to join me…,” classified advertisement, Seattle Daily Times, 12 May 1904, Page 2.
[4] See “MOVING picture showing Frisco burning…” classified advertisement, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 10 June 1906, Page 22.
[5] Stephen Bottomore, The Titanic and Silent Cinema (Sussex, England: The Projection Box – 2000), Pages 27-30. Footage that Harbeck shot in downtown Vancouver was uncovered and restored in the 1990s. In addition to this film, the Oregon Historical Society owns a few reels of his 1911 film of the Pendleton Round-Up, while the city of Seattle archives has some film footage of the Denny Regrade effort that may or may not have been shot by Harbeck. See Jane Tomkins and Andrew Martin, Vancouver in 1907: A Case Study of Archival Film as a Source of Local History; Presentation at the World Library Information Congress: 73^rd IFLA General Conference and Council, 19-23 August 2007, in Durban, South Africa (https://archive.ifla.org/IV/ifla73/papers/108-2.Tomkins_Martin-en.pdf), accessed 26 June 2021.
[6] See Frank C. Teck, “Seattle Scenes in Silver Horde,” Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 4 April 1920, Drama, Music and Motion Picture Section, Page 3.
[7] “Partner needed…” classified advertisement, Seattle Daily Times, 14 January 1909, Page 4.
[8] See “President in Moving Pictures for Orpheum,” Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 1 October 1909, Page 9; and Alan J. Stein, “U.S. President William Howard Taft attends Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition on September 30, 1909,” HistoryLink (https://www.historylink.org/File/8976), accessed 30 December 2020.
[9] “Seattle,” Moving Picture World, 22 July 1911, Page 134.
[10] “Coliseum Offers Motion Pictures of the Potlatch,” Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 25 July 1911, Page 5.
[11] “Get Alaska Pictures,” Seattle Daily Times, 16 September 1911, Page 5.
[12] “Moving Pictures of Southern Alaska,” Moving Picture News, 10 February 1912, Page 36.
[13] “Interesting Interview with Mr. W.H. Harbeck, of Seattle,” Moving Picture News, 17 February 1912, Page 20.
[14] “Remarkable Demonstration of the Educational Picture,” Moving Picture World, 17 February 1912, Page 561.

Following the Eden Musee showcase, William Harbeck conducted business in New York for the better part of three weeks before sailing for England on February 27, 1912. Crossing the Atlantic took nearly a week, but the filmmaker arrived in London on or about March 5^th, putting in a brief appearance at the offices of The Kinetograph and Lantern Weekly, an English trade paper. Harbeck was promoting more than just his Alaska film during this European tour. He was also looking to place his film on the Washington timber industry, as well as a documentary on mountain climbing and his film of the 1911 Pendleton rodeo. He also carved out time to shoot some European scenes, partly to fulfill his Canadian Pacific contract and also to augment his growing catalogue of subjects.

Harbeck’s schedule was a busy one. He was in London for only a few days before departing for Brussels, followed by Paris, before ending up in Berlin at the end of March. His plans were ambitious; from Germany he would travel to Moscow, climb aboard the Trans-Siberian Railway and shoot scenic films all the way to Vladivostok. From there he would travel by boat to Alaska and then, eventually, make his way back down to Seattle. These plans fell right into his sweet spot – scenic views, railroad scenes and pictures of Alaska, though he specifically timed his Paris visit so he could be on hand to shoot Easter festivities as well as the spring fashion shows.

That was the plan, at least; while in Berlin, William Harbeck abruptly changed his itinerary. Pictures along the Trans-Siberian Railway were attractive on paper, but a successful cameraman had to be open to opportunity. And while he was traveling in western Europe, opportunity presented itself: why take pictures of rail travel, something he had many times before, when instead he could return to New York in style, shooting on the newest, most luxurious ocean liner of the day, RMS Titanic?

If Harbeck’s Alaska film was emerging as an important subject, certainly pictures of Titanic’s maiden voyage could be marketed for top dollar. Only a fool would turn down what was, certainly, the chance of a lifetime.

His mind made up, William Harbeck sat down on April 1^st and wrote to his wife Catherine, detailing the revised plan. Catherine was no longer living in Toledo; at some point in 1911, with the boys getting older, she left Ohio and came to live with her husband in Seattle, after being apart for more than a decade. The couple shared an apartment on First Hill, at 1311 East Marion, near the present-day location of Seattle University. Harbeck further detailed his plans in a second letter to Catherine a few days later, postmarked from London, after which he left for Southampton. There he purchased a 2^nd class ticket aboard Titanic, departing on April 10^th; after brief stops in France and Ireland, the ship then steamed out into the Atlantic on what would be its first, and last, voyage.

Needless to say, this filming opportunity aboard Titanic didn’t go as planned. Shortly before midnight on April 14, 1912, the ship struck an iceberg in the North Atlantic, then sank in the early morning hours of the 15^th. Harbeck was among the 1,503 people who lost their lives that evening; his camera and a reported 100,000 feet of film went down with the ship.

What occurred during William Harbeck’s final hours can never be known, but once news of the sinking was out, it sent Catherine’s life into a tailspin. This was the biggest news story of the day, but the difficulty of getting to the wreck site meant that information could only trickle in, with details that were thinly sourced and sometimes contradictory. Catherine was living in a strange city, where she knew few people, frantically reaching out to family members and her husband’s business associates – anyone who might know any news about anything. Realistically, however, once she learned of the sinking there was little she could do other than sit on the opposite side of the world and hope for a miracle.

There were reasons to stay strong. Just three days after the incident, the Seattle Daily Times reported (incorrectly, it turns out) that William Harbeck’s name didn’t appear on the ship’s register, so there was a chance he never boarded at all.^[1] There was also a rumor that Harbeck was only aboard for the departure from Southampton, after which he disembarked in either France or Ireland and caught a different ship across the Atlantic, something that would allow him to film Titanic’s arrival in New York. He planned to stay in the Hotel Cadillac, prompting Catherine to reach out via telegram, only to be informed that her husband never checked in. As the days passed one into another, and with news out of Halifax, Nova Scotia, where the recovery effort was based, increasingly grim, the Harbeck family eventually became resigned to the fact that their patriarch was likely gone. To that end Catherine wired their eldest son John, in Toledo, and asked him to handle matters if, in fact, the worst had occurred.

It wasn’t long before John was called to duty – William Harbeck’s body was not only recovered, but was one of the few that could be immediately identified. This made him an outlier; of the 1,503 people who died on Titanic, only 340 bodies (about 22%) were recovered. And by the time that occurred many had been exposed to the elements for so long that they could not be easily identified, at least by visual means.

William Harbeck made identifying his body simple. His was the 35^th picked up by the Mackay-Bennett, a cable ship retrofitted and dispatched for the recovery effort. When he was pulled from the water Harbeck was wearing a black coat, grey tweed pants, a vest, red tie and black boots. He was probably in rough shape after being in the water for nearly a week, but in his pocket was his union card for the Seattle projectionist union, IATSE Local No. 154, so there was no mistaking who he was.

William Harbeck’s death was confirmed on April 22^nd, and formally announced the next day.^[2] Catherine wasted no time, boarding a train so she could get back to Toledo to be with John and Stanley.

Tributes to the cameraman rolled in over the days and weeks that followed, almost always attesting to his fine character and friendly demeanor. Will Day, an equipment dealer in London, had a short film that Harbeck took during his stay in England made available to a pair of local theatres, the proceeds going to help families impacted by the Titanic disaster.^[3] “It has been our pleasure to know [him]…” Alfred H. Saunders wrote in Moving Picture News. “He was always a cheery, jovial, progressive sort of a man, a man whom we could all appreciate for his sterling uprightedness and integrity in business.”^[4] That sentiment was shared by the folks over at Moving Picture World.

[Harbeck] contributed much to the enlightenment of his fellow man by making pictures that will outlive him as valuable records. His contribution to the cause of education was of much value. He believed in the educational movement and was constantly on the lookout for subjects that were really worth while [sic]…In ordinary parlance he might be called a cameraman. But he was an independent cameraman. He did not work by the week for an ordinary salary. He usually was financially interested in the pictures he was taking. He was accustomed to carrying out expeditions that required much capital, and, as a rule, he was successful. He was just getting to the point where he could enjoy life and carry out large projects that suited his fancy…^[5]

These outpourings occasionally mentioned William Harbeck as being the “official” cameraman for Titanic’s voyage, a detail that also got picked up in the Seattle Daily Times, Tacoma News Tribune and Moving Picture World, among other places.^[6] While there’s nothing to prove he had a formal arrangement, it’s possible he pitched the idea to the White Star Line, who operated Titanic, during his time in England. What may be more likely, however, was that this was an embellishment made to burnish Harbeck’s professional credentials in light of the tragedy.

All of this, of course, was traumatic for Catherine, who was forced to lock up the couple’s apartment at 1311 East Marion and leave for Toledo. She had little time to mourn. The cameraman’s body had been recovered, and the family wanted him brought back to Ohio. Here again, Harbeck was an outlier: of the 340 bodies recovered from Titanic, only 59 were sent home for burial – most were interred in Halifax. On May 8, 1912, a private family service was held for William Harbeck at Rosewood Presbyterian Church in Toledo, after which he was laid to rest in the family plot in Woodlawn Cemetery.

Arranging these services wasn’t Catherine’s only job. There was a process to get the body shipped from Halifax to Toledo, but an entirely separate one allowing her to take possession of the items retrieved from her husband’s pockets when he was recovered. Those included, she hoped, the diary he carried documenting his plans and business dealings. And, in fact, that diary was in William Harbeck’s pocket when he was pulled from the water, along with some traveler’s checks, gold and silver coins, a light meter for filming, a fountain pen, some false teeth, a ring and other miscellaneous items. Many of these became family heirlooms, but Catherine’s immediate concern was the diary, which likely contained information on any business dealings he had made in New York and Europe. This was crucial for her to understand because Catherine would need to assert her rights over Harbeck’s motion pictures so they wouldn’t be exploited after his death.

So after William Harbeck was laid to rest, getting legal control over his films became primary. She acted quickly; within a month of the tragedy, Catherine filed an injunction against Charles Wynard, George Hamilson and C.B. Clements of New York, looking to prevent them from “leasing, exhibiting or offering for sale” pictures associated with her husband.^[7] Three of Harbeck’s films were named in the injunction, including his Alaska pictures (collectively titled Panoramic Views of Alaska in Animated Maps), plus The Round-Up, Pendleton, Ore. Catherine had been tipped off by a sympathetic exhibitor in Washington, D.C. that these films (thought to have gone down with Titanic) were being made available on the open market. Tom Moore, the D.C. exhibitor, arranged a special screening of the Harbeck pictures so Catherine could secretly attend and verify that they were, in fact, her husband’s.

This legal battle between Catherine Harbeck and the Wynard group extended into the summer of 1912, and resulted in some confusing announcements in the motion picture trade press. Part of that stemmed from the fact that Charles Wynard had a legitimate business relationship with William Harbeck before his death. The two had met while the cameraman on the New York leg of his 1912 trip, with one trade paper claiming that Harbeck left the original negatives for his Pendleton and Alaska films with Wynard for safekeeping.^[8] That may have been true, but to Catherine he was an unknown quantity, and she needed to protect of her husband’s work.

Catherine Harbeck eventually sold limited exhibition rights for The Round-Up to Tom Moore – the same D.C. picture man who alerted her to the exhibition problem, and who had since become a party to her lawsuit. In July, however, Moore withdrew from the proceedings and sold those rights to none other than Charles Wynard. So now it was Wynard who controlled the regional rights to that film, but none of Harbeck’s other pictures, which included the Alaskan film, said to be the property of the cameraman’s estate. But even that was unclear, since Moving Picture World’s headline for this announcement identified Wynard as the representative for all Harbeck’s pictures. This seems to have been an honest mistake, but it spurred Catherine into action once again. Just a week after printing the Wynard announcement, her legal team dropped their own notice into the trade papers: Catherine Harbeck was the sole owner of her husband’s Alaska and Pendleton films, except for a handful of areas in the Northeast where rights to The Round-Up had been sold to a third party.^[9] Furthermore, the notice stated, anyone wishing to negotiate for her husband’s films would need to contact Catherine at 733 Michigan Avenue in Toledo, the longtime family home.

The Wynard suit was either resolved or fizzled in late July, more or less ending Catherine’s involvement in William Harbeck’s business affairs. It’s not clear how much she made from the exhibition of her husband’s films; other than the Pendleton deal with Tom Moore, no others were announced, although the pictures continued to be advertised in the trade press (with Stanley Harbeck listed as representative) for several months. Catherine received a wrongful death payout from the White Star Line in the amount of $4,375, but once her legal fees were taken into account, she may have walked away with little or nothing to show for the effort.^[10]

Catherine stayed away from the couple’s Seattle apartment until the fall of 1912; it’s not clear when she returned. Interestingly, though, she may have stayed in the Northwest for a time, continuing to be listed in the Seattle city directory for two more years (although she was also listed in the Toledo city directories for those same years). By 1915, however, she was back in Ohio for good, remaining until her death in May 1940.

By Eric L. Flom – November 2025

Notes:

[1] “Moving Picture Man May Have Met Death,” Seattle Daily Times, 17 April 1912, Page 3.
[2] See “Body Recovered from Titanic Disaster Said to be Seattle Man’s, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 23 April 1912, Page 1; and “Hope Gone That Harbeck is Alive,” Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 23 April 1912, Page 5. See also “Seattle Motion Picture Man’s Body Recovered,” Seattle Daily Times, 23 April 1912, Page 11.
[3] Stephen Bottomore, The Titanic and Silent Cinema (Sussex, England: The Projection Box – 2000), Page 45.
[4] Alfred H. Saunders, “William H. Harbeck,” Moving Picture News, 27 April 1912, Page 6.
[5] “Harbeck Lost on the Titanic,” Moving Picture World,” 11 May 1912, Page 506.
[6] See “Seattle Man Acted as Official Photographer,” Seattle Daily Times, 25 April 1912, Page 4; “Was on Titanic Taking Moving Pictures,” Tacoma News Tribune, 2 May 1912, Page 7; and “Notes of the Week,” Moving Picture News, 25 May 1912, Page 40.
[7] See “William H. Harbeck’s Widow Asks for Injunction,” Moving Picture News, 25 May 1912, Page 23; and “Harbeck Pictures in Litigation,” Moving Picture World, 1 June 1912, Page 805.
[8] “William H. Harbeck’s Widow Asks for Injunction.”
[9] See “Washington Notes,” Moving Picture News, 29 June 1912, Page 10; “Wynard Represents Harbeck Estate Pictures,” Moving Picture World, 3 August 1912, Page 455; “The Late W.H. Harbeck,” Moving Picture News, 10 August 1912, Page 18; and “Does Not Represent the Harbeck Estate,” Moving Picture World, 17 August 1912, Page 659.
[10] See Tony Cook, “Titanic’s Sinking Uncovered Toledo Victim’s Secrets,” Toledo Blade, 15 April 2012 (https://www.toledoblade.com/local/2012/04/15/Sinking-uncovered-Toledo-victim-s-secrets/201204150073), accessed 8 September 2019.

Under normal circumstances, we’ve reached the point where the story of William Harbeck is supposed to end. He was a pioneer filmmaker in the Northwest who was about to release his most ambitious film, but died, tragically, at what appeared to be his moment of triumph. This is where a historian like myself would usually expound on Harbeck’s contribution to early film, while offering closing thoughts on the life that was lived. That’s the traditional approach to take when your subject has been found floating face down in the Atlantic Ocean, and has been there for the better part of a week. But history can be surprising, and sometimes inexplicable. And that’s certainly the case with William Harbeck, because although he died on April 15, 1912, his story is a long way from being finished. In fact, it’s just getting started.

The next phase of William Harbeck’s story begins on July 23, 1912, three months after he was laid to rest, at a time when Catherine, still in Toledo, was wrapping up his business affairs. On that day, out in Seattle, a woman sat down and wrote a letter to the American Consul in Halifax, Nova Scotia. That letter no longer exists, but the writer was inquiring about the personal effects that Harbeck had on him when his body was pulled from the water. The American Consul, however, didn’t handle matters relating to Titanic, so he referred the letter to A.G. Jones, a representative for the White Star line who also based in Halifax. Jones, unfortunately, wasn’t the right person either. He responded on August 3^rd informing the writer, a Seattle woman named Brownie Harbeck, that any items found on the cameraman’s body would have been forwarded to the Provincial Secretary. Jones also told Miss Harbeck that personal items could only be released with the proper legal authorization, and offered to forward her inquiry to the officials who handled those matters.^[1]

It took three weeks before Brownie Harbeck got a formal response. The Provincial Secretary’s office pulled the cameraman’s file and, on August 23^rd, typed a one-page letter summarizing his personal items, ending with the fact that Catherine Harbeck had taken possession of everything at the end of May.^[2]

The curious thing about that disclosure – that Catherine had claimed all there was to claim – was that it was, apparently, of no consequence to Brownie Harbeck. On August 31^st she sent a second letter to Halifax, a hand-written note on a piece of William Harbeck’s business stationery. She had questions about two of the items in the Provincial Secretary’s letter. The first was about the money found in his pockets. The typed letter indicated that Harbeck was found with £15:0:0 in gold, but she didn’t quite know that that meant – was it £15 or £1,500? Also, the letter mentioned some traveler’s checks, but didn’t indicate the value of those checks.

That was the first paragraph of Brownie Harbeck’s letter; the second was shorter and a complete change of subject. Noting the list of items found with the body, Brownie Harbeck wrote “[r]eferring to lady’s articles among Wm. Harbeck’s effects. I knew the lady well. I understand she was also lost on the Titanic. Her name was Henriette Yvois. Do you know if such person’s body [has] ever been picked up and brought to Halifax?”^[3]

That was quite an aside. Lady’s articles? Among the items found on William Harbeck’s body was, curiously, a woman’s bag, which had contents of its own. That was surprising, as was Brownie Harbeck’s casual mention that the cameraman may have been traveling with someone, that his companion was a woman, and that she, as an outsider, was fully aware of that fact. That was new information, none of which came out while Catherine was working with officials in Halifax.

Brownie Harbeck received a reply on September 7^th from the Deputy Provincial Secretary that was brief and to the point: his office was receiving thousands of inquiries from friends and family of Titanic victims from around the globe, and he had no time to be pen pals with any of them. Curtly, he explained that Harbeck had £15 in gold, not £1,500, and didn’t bother to mention the traveler’s checks. He spent one line on Henriette Yvois, without speculating who she may have been, simply stating that she was not among the bodies that had been recovered and identified. His main point was that Catherine had already taken possession of all these personal items, so if Brownie had any further questions, she should contact Catherine at the family home in Toledo.^[4]

That ended the correspondence between Brownie Harbeck in Seattle and officials in Halifax, but started a new one between Halifax and John Harbeck in Toledo. The Deputy Provincial Secretary created at least two copies of his September 7^th letter – the original went to Brownie Harbeck in Seattle, but one copy went into their files while the other was forwarded to the Harbeck family in Toledo. So five days after the Deputy Provincial Secretary mailed his final letter to Brownie Harbeck, John wrote his own letter requesting additional details.^[5]

John’s initial note, written on September 12^th, was generally polite, asking if Brownie Harbeck had been given a list of his father’s possessions. When the answer came back as yes, John then typed out a two-page response which, like Brownie Harbeck had done earlier, was written on his father’s business stationery. “I am writing to inform you that Brownie Harbeck, of Seattle, whom you sent a list of my father’s effects, is no relative of my family,” he exclaimed. “…[A]ny correspondence relative to the recovery of the effects and body of Mr. Harbeck has been and should be carried on with my mother, Mrs. Catherine Harbeck, of Toledo.”^[6] John was angry, but suggested that the Provincial Secretary’s office could rectify the situation by providing him with copies of the Brownie correspondence. He assured Canadian authorities that he would keep everything in the strictest of confidence, that he was only protecting his mother’s interests, and that the family wouldn’t act on the information in any way. John was particularly keen to know if Brownie Harbeck had represented herself as a family member. Actually, she hadn’t; in the existing Brownie letters (the first of which is missing), she didn’t state the nature of her relationship at all. But representing herself as a “Harbeck” and using his business stationary was no doubt purposeful – an effort to lull officials into assuming that she was, in fact, related.

The Deputy Provincial Secretary replied to John Harbeck on September 30, 1912.^[7] This two-page letter closed the matter for good, though he failed to include copies of the Brownie Harbeck letters. Instead, he summarized the correspondence, omitting a lot of detail – like, for instance, the fact that William Harbeck may have been traveling with another woman. John was satisfied with this response, or at least he chose not to pursue the matter further. If there was additional contact between the parties, it doesn’t appear to have survived.

So the Harbeck family in Toledo were done with officials in Halifax, but they weren’t quite done with Brownie Harbeck. John promised not to act on any information he received, but there’s no chance that was honored. That’s because he had already been given the key piece of information – the carbon copy of the Deputy Provincial Secretary’s September 7^th letter had Brownie Harbeck’s return address. And it wasn’t just any address. It was 1311 East Marion Street in Seattle, the same apartment building where Catherine and William had been living. The Harbecks lived in Flat C. The Brownie letters, however, were written from Flat A.

According to the 1912 Seattle city directory, Flat A was being rented to a couple by the name of Henry and Anna Garbutt. Garbutt was a confectioner by trade who, within a few years, went into the grocery business with his brother, the two operating a pair of stores in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood. It appears likely, therefore, that the woman who identified herself as Brownie Harbeck was actually Anna Garbutt, and knowing that fact (which has never before been revealed) suggests how this incident unfolded.^[8] Arriving sometime in 1911, Catherine Harbeck was new to Seattle, reunited with her husband after a decade apart, but frequently left alone while he was off shooting new material. In a strange city and with few acquaintances, Catherine’s initial set of friends likely would have been her neighbors. After all, she and Anna Garbutt (and probably other women in the building) lived similar lives – they stayed at home, raised families and ran errands while their husbands worked. When news of Titanic’s sinking arrived, these families would have rallied around Catherine, offering hope and assistance in what must have been a terrifying situation. Then, when William Harbeck’s death was confirmed, Catherine left immediately for Toledo, where she and the boys would work to settle her husband’s affairs. But in doing so she had to leave everything behind in the couple’s apartment, so it makes sense that Catherine would have turned to someone in the building – in this case, Anna Garbutt – to leave a set of keys, asking her to look after things while she was away.

That scenario helps explain a few things about the Brownie mystery – for example, how she obtained pieces of William Harbeck’s business stationery on which to write at least one of her letters. It probably also explains how the name of Henriette Yvois was dropped into the conversation. Having a set of apartment keys (and a lot of unsupervised time) gave Anna Garbutt the opportunity to rummage through the Harbecks’ personal belongings, which would have included any correspondence Catherine left behind. Surely the name of Henriette Yvois turned up somewhere in that apartment, which was why Garbutt specifically called her out. Curiously, though, the Brownie letter from August 31^st mentions Yvois without indicating why she may have been traveling with the cameraman. It’s possible Anna Garbutt didn’t know; she may have been reacting to information left behind in the apartment and was trying to figure out how it all fit together. That may have been the whole point of referencing Henriette Yvois in the first place – Garbutt was fishing for information.

However this scenario played out, one thing is certain: at some point Catherine Harbeck left Toledo and returned to Seattle, then made an unannounced visit to 1311 East Marion, Flat A, where a very interesting (and likely heated) conversation took place. We’ll never know what transpired, but we know the end result: Catherine Harbeck moved out of the building and into a new apartment on East Jefferson, while the Garbutt family moved out at roughly the same time. In fact, the Garbutts dropped out of the Seattle city directory for two years before eventually resurfacing in an apartment on Olive Street.

The Brownie Harbeck letters, and any resulting fallout, were over by the fall of 1912, but they left some lingering questions. Who was Henriette Yvois and what was her relationship with the cameraman? Was Anna Garbutt pursuing a trivial bit of information, or was there more to that story?

A trip through William Harbeck’s recent past might be revealing.

By Eric L. Flom – November 2025

Notes:

[1] Letter from A.G. Jones to Brownie Harbeck, Esq. dated 3 August 1912, Titanic in Nova Scotia website (https://novascotia.ca/titanic/records.asp?ID=75&Lang=), accessed 5 February 2023.
[2] Letter from Deputy Provincial Secretary Brownie Harbeck, dated 23 August 1912, Titanic in Nova Scotia website (https://novascotia.ca/titanic/records.asp?ID=76&Lang=), accessed 5 February 2023.
[3] Letter from Brownie Harbeck to the Provincial Secretary’s Office, Halifax, Nova Scotia, dated 31 August 1912, Titanic in Nova Scotia website (https://novascotia.ca/titanic/records.asp?ID=77&Lang=), accessed 5 February 2023. It should be noted that some sources give Yvois’ last name as “Yrois.”
[4] Letter from Deputy Provincial Secretary Brownie Harbeck, dated 7 September 1912, Titanic in Nova Scotia website (https://novascotia.ca/titanic/records.asp?ID=78&Lang=), accessed 5 February 2023.
[5] Letter from John Harbeck to the Provincial Secretary’s Office, Halifax, Nova Scotia, dated 12 September 1912, Titanic in Nova Scotia website (https://novascotia.ca/titanic/records.asp?ID=79&Lang=), accessed 5 February 2023.
[6] Letter from John Harbeck to the Provincial Secretary’s Office, Halifax, Nova Scotia, dated 25 September 1912, Titanic in Nova Scotia website (https://novascotia.ca/titanic/records.asp?ID=81&Lang=), accessed 5 February 2023.
[7] Letter from Deputy Provincial Secretary to John Harbeck, dated 30 September 1912, Titanic in Nova Scotia website (https://novascotia.ca/titanic/records.asp?ID=83&Lang=), accessed 5 February 2023.
[8] Before tracing the Brownie Harbeck letters back to Anna Garbutt, the prevailing opinion had been that was that the Brownie letters may have been written by a woman named Katherine George, speculating that she may have been an investor in William Harbeck’s moviemaking. But Stephen Bottomore has suggested that Katherine George was probably Catherine Harbeck, as even a cursory look at city directories and U.S. Census materials shows that she went by Catherine, Katherine, Kate or Katie over the years. It’s entirely possible that her name was just incorrectly reported in an outside news source. (See Stephen Bottomore, The Titanic and Silent Cinema [Sussex, England: The Projection Box – 2000], Pages 45-46.) There was a Katherine George living in Seattle at the time, at 3119 Eastlake Avenue, but there’s nothing to suggest that she was involved with William Harbeck in any way.