883 photographic prints, approx. 19.5 x 19.5 inches

These large-format aerial photographs cover extensive portions of Virginia, and include parts of the bordering states of North Carolina, Maryland, and West Virginia. They were produced as part of efforts coordinated by the U.S. Geological Survey to provide cloud-free aerial photography coverage of the United States for use by state and federal agencies.

The National High Altitude Photography program (NHAP) photographs were taken from an altitude of 40,000 feet. Each image covers approximately 68 square miles.

The National Aerial Photography Program (NAPP) photographs were taken from an altitude of 20,000 feet, and each image covers approximately 32 square miles.

Both groups were taken with color infrared film, which renders most of the vegetation in red or magenta.

Arrangement and access:

The NHAP set includes 629 photographs taken from 1980 to 1986. The NAPP set includes 254 photographs taken from 1989 to 1991. Both sets are organized by a film roll number followed by a frame number (example: 513-171 is Roll 513, Frame 171). Roll and frame numbers as well as photography dates are printed on the images. Inventories have been created for both sets, searchable by state/county and by roll/frame numbers. These inventories also include latitude and longitude data for each photograph.

Provenance:

Transferred from the Virginia Department of Conservation and Recreation, 2012.

The WPA Historic Houses Drawings Collection includes 140 images of houses, courthouses, churches, mill houses, and taverns, representing 39 Virginia counties. In the early- to mid-1930s, the Virginia State Commission on Conservation and Development’s Division of History and Archaeology received funds from the Works Progress Administration’s (WPA) Federal Art Project to commission five artists to create drawings for a publication on historic Virginia shrines. Like other WPA-funded projects, the artists applied for work through local emergency relief offices before being assigned to the Federal Art Project. Several of the artists also contributed to other New Deal projects at the time, including stamp designs for the National Recovery Act and illustrations for the Index of American Design, a nationwide Federal Art Project. 

Under the direction of Hamilton J. Eckenrode, the commission’s Division of History and Archaeology began making a record of historic buildings in Virginia in 1932. Field assistant (and artist) Rex M. Allyn took photographs of buildings while on assignment to the Division’s Historic Highway Marker project. From 1932 to 1937, Allyn and four other artists—Edward A. Darby, Dorothea A. Farrington, E. Neville Harnsberger, and Elsie J. Mistie—each created numerous pen-and-ink and pencil drawings from the photographs. In some cases, the artists were asked to make adjustments to the architectural details to produce a drawing that more closely represented the original structure. In February 1936, Allyn wrote to Edward Darby regarding photographs of Gunston Hall, Mason Place, and Shellfield, asking him to remove cables that supported the chimney of Gunston Hall, a fence that was shown in front of Mason Place, and a modern porch at Shellfield. He also suggested that Darby “not show the little buildings and additions in the back part of the picture, or the swings and seats scattered about the yard” at Shellfield. The photographs from which the drawings were based are part of the WPA Photograph and Negative Collection at the Library of Virginia. 

At least three of the artists were academically trained in the visual arts from institutions such as the Chicago Institute of Art and the Maryland Institute of Art (now MICA). Edward Darby operated his own advertising and commercial illustration business in Atlanta, Georgia, and Baltimore, Maryland, before joining the project. And in 1940, the commission published thirteen of Darby’s illustrations in Virginia: A Guide to the Old Dominion, a book that was compiled by workers of the WPA’s state-sponsored Virginia Writers’ Project. Elsie Mistie was an accomplished artist, receiving commissions for a variety of art projects throughout her life. Mistie’s collection of about 500 drawings and paintings of wildflowers is now in the collections of the Arts & Science Center for Southeast Arkansas, and the remainder of her work is at the Rogers Historical Museum in Arkansas. Others, like Neville Harnsberger, did not continue a career in art. After working for the commission, she married and started a family in Atlanta. 

By 1937, the project began to wind down, as indicated in the history division’s letters. In July 1937, Allyn wrote to the FAP’s assistant director, Thomas C. Parker, asking to keep Dorothea Farrington on the project, noting that Darby had been transferred. He also commented, “I realize it is becoming necessary to reduce the number employed on many projects.” Although the drawings were never published by the commission as intended, likely due to diminishing funds, the collection presents an important record of Virginia architecture, both traditional and vernacular, and includes images of structures that are no longer standing today.  

Related resources and collections:

• WPA Photograph and Negative Collection 
• Department of Conservation and Development, Division of History, Records, 1927–1950, Acc. 24806a-c, 25913, and 41571: http://ead.lib.virginia.edu/vivaead/published/lva/vivadoc.pl?file=vi00960.xml 

References:
Rex M. Allyn to Edward A. Darby, February 10, 1936, WPA Artists Project Folder, Department of Conservation and Development, Division of History, Records, 1927–1950, Acc. 24806a-c, 25913, and 41571, the Library of Virginia, Richmond.   

Rex M. Allyn to Thomas C. Parker, July 12, 1937, WPA Artists Project Folder, Department of Conservation and Development, Division of History, Records, 1927–1950, Acc. 24806a-c, 25913, and 41571, the Library of Virginia, Richmond.

These photographs conform to the Kodak 1 camera’s distinctive 2.5-inch circular iris, and often capture those in the unidentified photographer’s entourage from a considerable distance, reducing them to delicate miniatures on hillsides or in sylvan glades. Tighter shots reveal happy-looking men and women in comfortably rumbled Victorian traveling clothes—apparently early enthusiasts of historic tourism. Other photos show an oxcart on the road to Petersburg, Grant’s headquarters at City Point (present-day Hopewell), Gen. William “Baldy” Smith’s headquarters during the Siege of Petersburg (referred to in the photo’s handwritten caption as “The Old Friend House”), a group luncheon on the grass of Petersburg’s famous “Crater,” St. John’s churchyard in Richmond, the State Capitol building, the bell tower and statues of Washington and Henry Clay (since removed) on the Capitol grounds. Also shown is a mothballed monitor-class gunship on the James, which, given the time and place the photo were taken, would have to be the Manhattan, Mahopac, or Tippecanoe. 

Most of the photos have handwritten captions and are dated, with most taken on October 9, 1889. 

Provenance:
Purchased, 2010

These rare slides, many of which are hand-colored, offer a glimpse into the founding of the Richmond branch of Goodwill Industries by Dr. J. T. Mastin and the Rev. Samuel Coles in 1923, before its eventual merger with Citizens’ Service Exchange. Featured are detailed interior and exterior shots of early Goodwill-related activity, including refurbishment of furniture and clothing, horse-drawn Goodwill wagons, volunteers and patrons, several scenes of prison interiors (presumably in connection with Mastin’s correctional work), and many images unrelated to Richmond, including views of England and South Africa. The Goodwill headquarters featured so prominently in these images stood at 1814 E. Grace Street, only a few yards from the Craig House in Shockoe Bottom, and has since vanished without a trace. 

The slides most likely served as a visual aid to educational or religious lectures. Lantern slides, as a technology, were popular in America as early as 1850, yielding “magic” projections of images large enough to be easily visible to large audiences. 

The accompanying collection file contains much biographical information about Mastin (1855–1943), a Methodist minister, secretary of the State Board of Charities and Corrections, a native Virginian and, according to one article, “the South’s greatest social worker.” 

Provenance:
Purchased, 2007

This collection of original illustrations and chapter head- and end-pieces was created by Edward A. Darby for Virginia: A Guide to the Old Dominion.   Compiled by workers of the Work Projects Administration’s state-sponsored Virginia Writers’ Project (1940), the book was initiated as one in a series of state guides begun in 1935 under the Federal Writers Project and was designed to give work to writers, editors, historians, and researchers.

All thirteen of the drawings used in Virginia: A Guide to the Old Dominion can be found in this collection of lighthearted, optimistic, and idealized images. The detailed artwork depicts iconic landmarks, historic sites, and symbols of the early-20th-century countryside that would be recognizable to many Virginians today. Also included in the collection are five additional drawings that do not appear in the guide. They represent an imagined Virginia, where tidewater monuments stand at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains, and where oxcarts and buggies share the landscape with speeding trains, automobiles, and airplanes.

Arrangement and access:
The collection is arranged in a single series, corresponding to the order in which the illustrations appear in Virginia: A Guide to the Old Dominion, followed by the five remaining drawings.

This album bears a handwritten inscription by Charles T. Cobb, dated March 1935: “The photographs in this album are of my deceased father and his Wolf Pitt Copper Mines, which he once owned and operated at Virgilina, Virginia, in the early 1900s, during the time we lived in the South. He sold the mine holdings in 1907 to the owners of the Blue Wing Copper Mines Co. for a very large amount.” 

In addition to its photo-documentation of Virginia copper-mining practices of the turn of the century, this album contains rare visual information about Virgilina itself in its “boom days”—a busy little town of mining and moonshining, muddy roads and newly built hotels, houses and storefronts in a rugged landscape stripped of trees. Included are photos of the Jones Distillery, where corn whisky was manufactured (“by U.S. permit,” the handwritten caption assures us), local mining bosses William Battershill and George B. Cobb, and even the Hungarian “Count Carachristy” [sic], an expert in coal distillation. 

Provenance:
Donation, 1997

Billed as “the South’s most beautiful ballroom, cooled by nature’s breezes,” the whimsically named Tantilla Garden opened in the 3800 block of Richmond’s West Broad Street in 1931. On the ground level was a miniature golf range (at some point converted to Tiny Town Bowling Alley). The dance hall opened later on the upper level. Ironically, the inclusive dates of Virginia’s prohibition of “liquor by the drink” (1933–1968) coincide almost precisely with Tantilla’s dates of operation. Patrons of “the Garden” were required to “brown bag” it, arriving with their own liquor and mixing cocktails at the table under the gaze of cooperative management. The bar supplied soda and fruit juices.

Tantilla Garden was a destination on the Big Band circuit, hosting nationally popular performers such as Duke Ellington and Tommy Dorsey in addition to beloved local bands and performers, some of whose names have become pop-cultural footnotes. Among those featured on the posters in our collection are Spyder Turner, Jan Garber, Pat Patton, Charlie Wakefield, Earl Mellen and his Melodies, Benny Benson and the Texas Cyclone, Ron Moody and the Centaurs, the Continentals, the Coquettes, the Dynamic Blazers, Glen Gray and the Casa Loma Orchestra, Red Nichols and His Pennies, Johnny Mack, Sammy Kaye, Lang Thompson, Jokers Wild, the Escorts, the Mind Expansion Club, Skeets Morris, Jelly Leftwich, and Viola Smith, “sensational girl drummer.”

After the Big Band and early R&B eras, Tantilla Garden worked to transition to changing music tastes, with mixed results, by hosting rock, country, and even psychedelic performers, as evidenced by the far-out poster for “the first psychedelic dance in Virginia,” with “mind music electrically performed” by the Actual Mushroom. When Tantilla was razed in 1969, bricks were sold to sentimental Richmonders for 25 cents apiece. Tantilla (1989), the second album of the Richmond-born rock band House of Freaks, is named after the venue. As of 2011, the site remains a parking lot.

The promotional posters in our collection, many stenciled, painted, and assembled by hand from mixed media, are dominated by grounds of intense primary color. Among the posters is an undated, hand-painted hostess section assignment chart, each name prefaced with the formal honorifics “Mrs.” or “Miss.”

 Arrangement and access:
The entire collection is available on Digitool.

 Provenance:  Purchased, 2008

This collection contains the photographer’s 35mm Ektachrome color slides and digital scans of original prints. The images capture architectural, environmental, commercial, and cultural subjects in Virginia, including private homes, schools, restaurants, hotels, bridges, theaters, barns, churches, cemeteries, courthouses, post offices, fire and railway stations, drug stores, barber shops, banks, and service stations.

Pete Calos, an engineer at Allied Chemical for most of his professional life, made the images between 1977 and 2005 for local and architectural historians. In retirement, Calos began to write and illustrate his own travelogue presentations, with titles such as “Back Roads of Virginia,” “All 100 County Courthouses,” “Virginia Diners,” “Historic Route 1,” “Where Are You in Richmond?,” “Where Are You in Danville?,” and “McDonald’s Symphony.” Though a recreational photographer, Calos proved to have a sharp eye for the transience of the modern, and the foresight and technical ability to capture it, finding beauty in the open girder work of rural bridges and uncanny precision in typical bacon-and-eggs breakfasts. His “Diner Series,” focusing on River City, Tastee 29, Surrey House, and Virginia Diners, and the now-vanished Skull and Bones Restaurant on Virginia Commonwealth University’s medical campus, a haunt of medical students for decades, captures not only the restaurant buildings themselves but the staff, interior décor and fixtures, menus, and food. Similarly, his photographs of Virginia’s monumental Works Progress Administration murals in post offices document not only the artwork but their specific architectural contexts.

 Arrangement and access:
The collection is organized according to Calos’ original scheme in nine series, which derive from his presentations on bridges, churches of Petersburg, historic churches, colonial churches, diners, lighthouses, Route 1 (Jefferson Davis Highway), small-town USA, WPA murals, and a CD-ROM series of mixed subjects.

 Provenance:
Donated, 2006

Harry Cowles Mann (1866–1926) was a vastly prolific commercial photographer based in Norfolk, Virginia, specializing in industrial views, portraits, and landscapes, particularly artful Cape Henry beach scenes. Though he hailed from the large and socially prominent Mann family of Virginia (his uncle was Gov. William Hodges Mann and his father was Edwin Mann, a judge on Petersburg’s Hustings Court), little is known of his personal life other than that he was a confirmed bachelor, of fragile health for the second half of his life, and died—for reasons that remain unclear—at the State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded in Lynchburg. Sometime after being commissioned to photograph the 1907 Jamestown Exposition, Mann rented a studio space at 286 Main Street in downtown Norfolk, where he specialized in commercial photography, including “Buildings, Machinery, Landscapes and All Photographic Work for Half-Tone Reproduction.” Mann’s work was featured in National Geographic and his “nature portraits” of Craney Island and the Dismal Swamp won awards in photo competitions in Paris, London, and New York.

The Library’s collection of more than 3,000 prints and glass-plate negatives—more than half of which are available online—show Norfolk during and immediately after World War I. These include images of plantation houses; historic churches; public schools; department store display windows; architectural interiors of every description, including formal parlors, bedrooms, factory work spaces, restaurant dining rooms, and retail spaces; and even some technically innovative underwater shots. An unofficial collection within the collection is a group of more than 500 portraits of anonymous children casually posing with teddy bears and tricycles outside what appear to be their working- and middle-class homes in Norfolk. 

Arrangement and access:
1,600 images are available on DigiTool.

Provenance:
Transferred to the Library from the Virginia Chamber of Commerce, 1941

 References:
“Mann’s Children.” Virginia Cavalcade, vol. 27, no. 4 (1978)
“Virginians at Play: A Galley of Photographs by Harry C. Mann.” Virginia Cavalcade, vol. 38, no. 4 (1989) Walker, Carroll H.
“A Look Back at Harry C. Mann, Photographer.” The Downtowner, vol. 2, no. 10 (March 1990)
Yarsinske, Amy Waters. Virginia Beach: Jewel Resort of the Atlantic (1998) 

Related resources and collections:
Harry C. Mann Photographic Panorama Collection, C1: 159

A native of Norfolk, Virginia, mechanical engineer Richard E. Prince Jr. (1920–2002) was an authority on the cultural, historical, and technical dimensions of the American railway, publishing extensively on the subject in the 1960s and 1970s. Almost all of the film negatives in our collection were created by Prince, while the glass plates were created by E. F. Horn, who worked at the South Louisville yards of the Louisville-Nashville line. The original negative envelopes, which have been preserved, are inscribed with various technical designations and codes that may be understood by railway aficionados but will mean little to the layperson. Prince also includes notes on the photographs’ location, date, history, and subject. The vast majority of these black-and-white photos are of steam locomotives, with occasional images of diesel engines, yard scenes, railcars, and cabooses. 

Arrangement and access:
The collection is arranged in three series. Series A represents numerical index 1 through 642, and are arranged in order of engine number, lowest to highest, subcategorized under the proper name of each railroad line. Almost all images in Series A predate 1940. Series B is similarly arranged, containing approximately 1,600 images dated between 1937 and 1948, and contains copy film of existing photographs not taken by Prince. The glass-plate negatives constitute Series C and are arranged in order of engine number, lowest to highest, and date from approximately 1907 to 1926. The Library holds a detailed though incomplete paper-based finding aid.

Provenance:
Donated, 1997