Archive Note
Hildebrandt, born around 1825 in the German Confederation, learned tattooing aboard the USS United States during Navy service from 1846 to 1849, then traveled camp to camp during the Civil War tattooing soldiers of the Union Army of the Potomac. He made it a full-time trade after the war, opening his Oak Street shop in lower Manhattan around 1870, commonly identified as the first permanent professional tattoo studio in the country. His later life declined sharply: in 1885 a New York paper reported him jailed for disorderly conduct, and he died in 1890 at the New York City Asylum for the Insane on Wards Island. The claim that he tattooed Confederate as well as Union troops is not supported by evidence a tattoo historian could find, so only the Union work is documented.