[2] She suffered from poor health most of her life and missed a great deal of school as a child due to illness.

[3] Northend began publishing "short historical sketches" in newspapers in the early 1900s, taking photographs with her Kodak camera to illustrate them.

[3] According to the Anaconda Standard she had over 14,000 photographs to her credit by 1910; due to her "extreme nervousness," she could not physically take the pictures herself, but closely supervised their creation.

[4] She published countless photographs in books and periodicals under her own name, and ran a successful business selling images to editors, architects, decorators, and historians.

[5] She traveled all over New England, writing about homes and gardens and supervising the photography, often spending hours arranging a single room before a photo shoot.