Joseph Swartz was the founder and owner of the Swartz shingle mill on Swartz pond, three miles southeast of Granite Falls, Washington. Swartz was born on March 15, 1860 in the province of Podolsk in southern Russia. After graduating from college and serving in the army in Russia, he prepared himself to immigrate to the United States by studying industrial arts and learning the trade of machinist. Upon immigrating to the U.S. in 1884, Swartz went directly to Cleveland, where he worked for eighteen months in a machine shop. In Ohio, he was joined by his fiancée Mary Vinshinkof of Bershad, Russia, who he married in 1886. He spent three years clearing a timbered tract of land in Ohio before moving to Missouri and opening a shoe store in Kansas City.

After a fire destroyed this business, he went to Seattle, arriving just after the Great Fire of 1889, and from there to Snohomish County where he took a homestead east of Granite Falls. Around 1900, he formed a shingle mill business with a Mr. Stacey under the firm name of Swartz & Stacey until Stacey's retirement in 1903; the mill was one of the four shingle mills near Granite Falls at that time. Granite Falls boomed during the early 1900s, with as many as twelve lumber mills operating at one time. Swartz shingle mill and the nearby logging camp ran till at least 1906. As of 1906, Swartz had four children, Leo (b. 1887), Elbert (b. 1888), Florence (b. 1890) and Gladys (b.1896), though the photographs in the collection suggest that Swartz and his wife had more children after this date.