Hugh J. Chisholm was originally a large distributor of printed news materials sold on railroads and steamships throughout the northeast. In 1876 he started a lithographic printing company with his brothers that produced many pictorial tourist guides. While their lithographic material was printed in Portland, they imported engraved material in from Germany. At the same time they became heavily invested in Maine’s wood pulp industry. By 1892 they had become an early pioneer in publishing view-cards of the Northeast. Many of their cards were made as heavily retouched photo-chromolithographs.
