With the invention of wrapping machines in the 19th century, pieces of plain card were used as protective stiffeners to protect the contents of paper packages. By the late 1870s in the United States, Allen & Ginter were embellishing these inserts with advertisements and illustrations. This quickly became an efficient and creative means of cultivating brand loyalty, and the practice spread rapidly to Great Britain and other foreign manufacturers. By the 1890s, many of the larger British tobacco companies were issuing cards, and they soon progressed to series on particular themes: actresses, soldiers, ships, kings and queens, etc.

The outbreak of war in 1914 inspired many patriotic card issues. Multiple influences were at work: the spontaneous expression of national pride; a desire to help the war effort; an insatiable public craving for news, particularly good news and information; a wish to glorify the heroism of British forces; and a determination to demonstrate the supporting role of civilians on the home front. Three of the seven sets in the British Cigarette Card Collection represent this time period: Army Life (October 1910), Regimental Uniforms (July 1912 and July 1914), and Military Motors (October 1916).

The popularity of cigarette cards grew during the 1920s and 1930s. Many of the sets issued during this time were reissues of earlier series with a timeless appeal. Drum Banners & Cap Badges (September 1924), Military Head-Dress (March 1931), and British Military Uniforms presented by Mornflake Oats are typical series based on historical themes. In the 1930s, as the signs of approaching conflict became more intense, themes with a military flavor took on an increasingly important role. There were those that emphasized knowledge and awareness of wartime matters, such as Uniforms of the Territorial Army, issued by John Player & Sons in October 1939. In 1940 cigarette cards were officially banned by the British wartime government as an unnecessary and wasteful use of raw materials. The issuing of cigarette cards was not widely revived following World War II, perhaps because of the cost.

Arrangement and access:
The cards, mounted in a vintage album, are organized by series: Army Life (October 1910, John Player & Sons), Regimental Uniforms (July 1912 and July 1914, John Player & Sons), Military Motors (October 1916, W. D. & H. O. Wills), Drum Banners & Cap Badges (September 1924, John Player & Sons), Military Head-Dress (March 1931, John Player & Sons), Uniforms of the Territorial Army (October 1939, John Player & Sons), British Military Uniforms (date unknown, presented by Mornflake Oats). 

Provenance:  Purchase, 1960 

Richmond-based painter J. Bohannan was born in New York City in 1950 and moved with his family at age two to Hilton Village, Newport News, and later, as a teenager, to Hopewell. After studying art at the Richmond Professional Institute (now Virginia Commonwealth University) in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Bohannan worked as a salesman in his father’s art supply store, selling his own original artwork on the side. By his own admission, his paintings of the time were derivative of the European high art and contemporary abstraction he had studied at RPI. Then one day he picked up a copy of Matthew Baigell’s The American Scene: American Painting of the 1930s (1974) from a discount book bin. Until then, Bohannan says, he had never really seen, much less studied, modern American painting, despite four years of formal art education.

Working alongside street artists in Verona and Munich, copying famous Caravaggios and Bouchers in pastel on public sidewalks, Bohannan developed a passion for “plastic realism,” embedding human forms in visual space in a way that is, as Bohannan puts it, “more there than right”—that is, more materially present than technically correct. After his return to Virginia from Europe, Bohannan began developing a latter-day American Scene style, and his career took off in a wave of commissions. In 1995, after an employee of Philip Morris saw one of his paintings in a Richmond coffee shop, the company began hiring Bohannan to create the artwork for its “Keep Tobacco Clean” poster series, intended for display in its growers’ warehouses.

The J. Bohannan Poster and Drawing Collection is a rich assortment of original material donated by Bohannan, and includes process drawings and other work related to Bohannan’s ongoing series (begun in 2003) of uncommissioned canvases depicting various Richmond-related historic figures such as Gilbert Hunt of the Richmond Theatre fire fame, slavery escapee Henry Box Brown, and bank robbers Robert Howard Mais and Walter Legenza. Also in the collection are color photographs, taken by Bohannan, of various finished canvases (1989–2008) depicting scenes from Virginia history, folklore, carnivals, nightlife, etc.

Arrangement and access:  Mixed materials organized by theme. 

Provenance:  Donated 2011

Among our most unique holdings, this small and unassuming piece, assembled by Dr. J. H. Breazeale (1889–1966), a veterinarian who served in the Army Medical Corps, reflects the striking public-private dichotomies of life in wartime, serving apparently as both a family photo album and work journal. Approximately half of Breazeale’s forty-eight amateur photos endearingly capture his wife and young sons at home, with handwritten captions such as “Branson’s first trousers” and “Calling kitty.” The rest of the images document the grim duties of a wartime veterinarian, with sobering captions such as “These pens contain 1300 Missouri Mules,” “Shot for losing foot,” “Burial at sea,” and “Loading the dead wagon, Newport News, Va.” At the outset of World War I, the mule was indispensible for moving artillery, ammunition, and other supplies. It’s estimated that during the war more than 500,000 horses and mules were processed for use in Europe, with more than 68,000 killed in the course of action. 

Provenance:
Purchased

In the early twentieth century, the Appalachian Power Company built a series of hydroelectric dams on the New River in Wythe County, Virginia. Completed in 1912, the Byllesby Dam took its name from H. M. Byllesby and Company, a Chicago investment firm that helped start Appalachian Power, and it created the serene 335-acre Byllesby Reservoir still popular with local fishermen and recreational boaters.

The photographs in this collection document the phases of the dam’s construction and the building methods of the period, with interior shots of the transformer house and its giant turbines and wide-angle exterior views of the dam and cement-mixing plant with its and volute casing and draft tube forms, like abstract sculptures in the wilderness, awaiting cement. As significantly, the photographs capture the daily lives of the workers who made their home in the camp, with images of black-papered dormitories for engineers and office staff, tidy vegetable gardens growing beneath power lines, a pair of well-dressed women on horseback (on the same horse), candid shots of “natives” (locals), and various shots of workers at rest and play and gathered around a campfire at night. The collection also includes two commercially produced scenic postcards of the completed dam and an original dance card for an October 11, 1912, banquet hosted by the Appalachian Power Company for its employees. The dance card offers this verse: “Ye who have worked and wrought this wondrous change / In these wild-timbered hills of Appalachia’s Range, / Forget, awhile, the caging of a giant to conserve his power, / And give to Mirth and Terpsichore this hour.” Most of the modern copy photographs, the originals of which are housed at the Department of Historic Resources, include annotations and dates.

A peculiar addition to our Byllesby Dam collection are the photographic headshots of the notorious “Allen Gang” members who shot and killed five court officials and bystanders at the Carroll County Courthouse on March 14, 1912. The courtroom raid and subsequent manhunt unfolded near the Byllesby Dam construction site, and one can only speculate about the ways in which this affected the workers.

Arrangement and access:
Roughly chronological.

Provenance:
Albums purchased 2010.
Modern copy photographs gift of the Virginia Department of Historic Resources, 1991

Bookplates, small paper panels denoting book-ownership, have their origins in Renaissance Germany. Their use was standard in the eighteenth century, when books were vastly expensive and hard to produce, and they became popular as status symbols and collectibles during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries’ renewed interest in “the culture of the book.” Our collection demonstrates the extraordinary aesthetic range of bookplates, including abstract designs, landscapes, human subjects, crests, and mythological figures, ranging in style from the staid and classically armorial to the privately iconographic and bizarre.

The majority of this collection consists of bookplates belonging to notable Virginians, including Lieutenant Governor Robert Dinwiddie, Declaration-signatory George Wythe, Constitutional co-author Gouverneur Morris, Revolutionary general Hugh Mercer, Col. George Lee Turberville, DAR Magazine contributor (and great-granddaughter of Patrick Henry) Elizabeth Henry Lyons (“Lift the Latch and Find Me,” her bookplate says), Civil War major and correspondent John Hooper, Richmond city councilman and industrialist James Branch Ransom (whose mock-armorial crest features a cartoon chicken), prominent Richmond physicians Samuel Dove and John Brodnax, authors John R. Witcraft and the Rev. Philip Slaughter, Powhatan-born U.S. comptroller John Skelton Williams, and aviator, polar explorer, and Medal-of-Honor-winner Rear Admiral Richard Evelyn Byrd, of Winchester, a descendant not only of Pocahontas and John Rolfe but of William Byrd II, founder of Richmond. Also included are bookplates from Rainbow & Hannah’s Circulating Library in Norfolk, Va., William Henry, Duke of Clarence (future Kind of England, William IV), Murray, Earl of Dunmore, the last Royal Governor of the Colony of Virginia (“Rob them?”), a re-strike of George Washington’s personal bookplate, plates from the libraries of William and Mary and Columbia University, and a handful of Dutch and Portuguese plates, apparently from early twentieth-century collectors.  

Arrangement and access:
Alphabetical by name 

Related resources and collections:
C1: 107   Dugald Stewart Walker Bookplate Collection