Her 4,000 glass-plate negatives are the best record of Elderbrook ever made.
Eleanor Kaye opened a portrait studio over the hardware store in 1888 and kept it for fifty years. She photographed weddings, school classes, the mill workers and, at their families' request, the dead: a common Victorian custom she handled with unusual tenderness.
She also photographed the cemetery itself, year after year, which is how we know what the beech looked like as a sapling and where several lost markers once stood. Her negatives were saved from a flooded basement in 1974 and are now held by the Elderbrook Museum.
She asked to be buried under the beech so she could "keep an eye on it."