Biographies of Oakwood Cemetery Residents
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OLIPHANT, WILLIAM JAMES (1845-1930) Buried in Section 3, lot 758
William James Oliphant, photographer, was born in Lawrenceburg, Indiana, on September 30, 1845. His father was a well-known jeweler on Pecan Street. At the outbreak of the Civil War, when he was fifteen, Oliphant enlisted in Company G, Sixth Texas Infantry, Army of Tennessee. During the war he was shot seven or eight times and captured twice. After returning to Austin he apparently studied photography in the studio of Stone and Waggoner. Oliphant opened his photographic studio in 1868 and ran his studio until he changed careers in 1881. Oliphant was especially skillful in stereoscopic and landscape photography. His paper prints range from tiny locket sizes up to seventeen by twenty inches. In his first years in business he also made ambrotypes. He left photography in 1881, probably because of physical handicaps caused by war wounds. He was subsequently employed in many governmental offices. He was a Mason and a member of the Travis Rifles and the Washington Steam Fire Engine Company. His first wife, Lizzie J. (Walker), died in 1873. In 1877 he married Alice Olive Townsend of Austin; they had three sons and a daughter, Jane Elizabeth, who married Texas historian Walter Prescott Webb. Oliphant died at his home on November 11, 1930.Source
www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/
