- [Jay] When Jimmy Neuter was a kid,
he spent a lot of time with his grandfather,
an iron worker who built Chicago skyscrapers.
Jimmy says this photo taken nine stories up,
says a lot about him.
- He was a bad-ass I mean,
he was just meat and potatoes.
He worked hard for his life.
And I learned a lot from him.
(hammer clanging)
- [Jay] Jimmy says he learned a love of history
and about the beauty of things made by hand.
Jimmy Nuter does architectural salvage.
Sometimes he finds what you'd expect in an old house,
and he's got a warehouse full of pre-1930 gems,
but he also has to be open to the unexpected things
a house might offer up.
A few months ago, Jimmy was working in a house
on the north side of Chicago and it held a big surprise.
- From the outside, I mean, you'd drive right by
and think nothing of it.
- [Jay] And even inside there wasn't much of interest,
but sometimes he says, you just get a feeling.
- There's something here, beyond what you're seeing.
There's something here.
I just, it's a weird thing to say.
I just don't know how to explain it.
- [Jay] He climbed into the unfinished attic,
nothing but insulation.
All he found were some old business cards and letters,
he was about ready to leave.
- [Jimmy] Just at that point,
I stumbled on the first glass plate.
- [Jay] We're glass plate negatives, dozens of them,
the kind common in photography until the early 20th century.
- The very, very first image that I held up
and was able to blow off.
I saw this big giant dog.
I don't know if it was a Burmese Mountain Dog
or a St. Bernard.
Now, that's a strange picture.
I'd put that one off to the side.
And then I saw a really beautiful portrait of a woman.
- [Jay] There were more than 75 altogether
and he brought them back to his warehouse.
- And then the next picture I saw was
a family in the living room and a bunch of portraits
in the background, really sophisticated paintings.
- [Jay] But these were all negative images.
He wanted a better look.
He brought the plates home where there was an amazingly
coincidental resource.
Jimmy's partner, Kari McCluskey is an artist
who works at the Art Institute of Chicago
and specializes in glass plate negatives.
- They were over a hundred years old.
It was amazing. They're so tough.
If this would have been film,
it never would have survived.
- [Jay] And when they started scanning
what they saw took their breath away.
- [Kari] There were so many of them,
all of family and not in a studio, in their home
and in their backyard.
And then we realized that was the same house
that he found them in.
It was just like - it just kept unfolding.
- [Jay] There were many pictures of a woman
and her daughter often with the big dog.
There were scenes of men gathering
and then some shots of other people posing
sometimes in front of a white cloth or newspaper.
But who was this family?
And why did they have this kind of camera,
usually used in a studio for more formal portraits.
There were clues in the papers Jimmy found in that attic.
- One of the names that kept coming back up
was a Hermann Schultz.
And so I just arbitrarily punched Hermann
in Google. Found out that there was a Hermann Schultz
who happened to be a famous portrait painter.
- [Jay] That would explain all the paintings
in the living room and the people posing.
He must have used them as a reference for portraits.
There is just one photo of someone who appears to be the dad
and then a posed shot of the same man.
Jimmy found out that Hermann Schultz was from Norway.
- He came to America around 1892
and was commissioned by Carter Harrison,
the mayor of Chicago, to paint his portrait
for the World's Fair.
- [Jay] A Norwegian-American museum
has a collection of his paintings.
One of which is a portrait of his wife and dog
visible in this photograph taken in their living room.
Hermann's wife was Hedvig,
and they had one daughter Sigrid, born in 1893.
When Jimmy Googled them,
the bombshell discovery came late at night.
- Kari was in bed by then and I quietly said,
"Kari, I think I just found something really cool."
- [Jay] It turns out that this little girl
with the big dog, grew up
to be a groundbreaking foreign correspondent
for the Chicago Tribune.
- She was a very, very big deal.
- [Jay] Ron Grossman is a longtime
Chicago Tribune reporter and it's unofficial historian.
He says, "Sigrid Schultz held positions unheard of
for a woman in her time."
- She was appointed just after World War One
as a correspondent for the Tribune stationed in Berlin,
rose to be the chief of that bureau.
And eventually chief of all the bureaus in central Europe.
- [Jay] During the thirties,
Sigrid Schultz became a key voice from inside Germany,
reporting on what was already occurring there.
- [Ron] Some of her material she feared
would not get past the censors.
So she wrote it under a fake byline, John Dickson,
and usually went to a nearby foreign country
to file the material.
- [Jay] The Schultz family had left that house
and Chicago many years earlier in 1901
when Sigrid was eight.
She grew up in Germany and France.
The house had at least nine more owners
before it was torn down in 2018.
None of them apparently ever thought
to look very carefully in the attic.