Andrew Joseph Russell was a 19th-century American photographer of the Civil War and the Union Pacific Railroad.

Russell was born in New Hampshire in 1829 but raised in New York City. He trained as a painter before the Civil War. There, he was assigned to the United States Military Railroad Construction Corps, partly because his family had a history in canal and railroad construction. In that role, he primarily photographed transportation subjects for the Union. Still, he took a few photographs of greater historical and graphical interest, which the Mathew Brady Studios later sold and distributed.

One more famous photo was “Confederate dead Behind the Stone Wall” after the Battle of Chancellorsville, Virginia, which occurred in May 1863. After the Civil War, Russell was commissioned by the Union Pacific Railroad to photograph the eastern portion of the route as it moved west from Nebraska toward Promontory Point in Utah. He is most famous for his “Joining of the Rails” image of the laying of the Golden Spike at Promontory Point, Utah, but he also took several photographs of the American West. After 1870, Russell returned to  New York, where he became the world’s first photojournalist, working for Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper until the early 1890s.

 

©Kathy Alexander/Legends of America, updated September 2026.