Bert Sadler

Robert "Bert" Sadler, Jr. (October 31, 1875 – 1963) was an American photographer who captured daily life in at the start of the 20th-century in suburban America.

Biography Sadler was born in 1875 in Laurel, Maryland, to pharmacist Robert H. Sadler and his first wife Margaret Miller Jackson McCeney. He attended Eastern High School in Washington, D.C., and then began work in the clerical offices of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. In 1909 he began working for the Post Office Department's Postal Savings Division, from which he retired in 1946 as a clerk in the Third Assistant Postmaster General's office. Sadler never married, and spent his entire life living in the house he was born.

In 1905, while still working for the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, he acquired an 1897 Eastman Kodak camera and began documenting pre-WWI life in the prosperous town of Laurel, then a notable stopping point between Washington, D.C., and Baltimore, Maryland. He was a prolific photographer of the experience of a small town as it shifted from a mill town to a suburb, and captured the daily experiences of many of the town's residents and its bustling main street. According to critic Ferdinand Protzman

Sadler's photographic subjects include the Laurel Park Racetrack, In the mid 1990s Sadler's gave his scrapbooks and 1,300 glass plate negatives on permanent loan to the Laurel Museum for the creation of the Sadler Collection, formally donating the works in 2007. Snapshots in Time: Our Community in 1910 and 2010, 2010 Behind the Bricks: 20 Years of the Laurel Museum, 2016