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

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

More than a picture album, this carefully composed narrative history of the Petersburg Federal Reformatory (now the low-security Federal Corrections Institute outside Hopewell, Virginia) describes and photographically documents the institution’s first eighteen years. Founded in 1930 as a makeshift camp on former farm properties along the Appomattox, the reformatory quickly achieved “an atmosphere of permanency” through the efforts of a relatively small inmate population the narrative characterizes as enthusiastic, industrious, and dignified. 

Indeed, with its stately administrative building and quadrangle of formal hedges, the reformatory, in these photos, looks more like an English country estate than a Depression-era prison. According to the narrative, the inmates took great pride in beautifying the reformatory, which they essentially built from the ground up with local materials and resources, including dogwood, mimosa, redbud, and rambler roses. An ornamental fish pond was even created by flooding the cellar of a vanished farmhouse. A beautiful Arts and Crafts house, built by inmates for the warden, featured a fireplace of petrified wood.  The reformatory was from its earliest days almost completely self-sustaining, with vast fields of alfalfa, squash, and potatoes; horse and mule barns; a dairy herd and modern milking machines; a piggery and slaughterhouse; a cinderblock-making facility; a power plant; and even its own fire station with homemade firefighting vehicles. The changing demographics of the prison population, including the introduction of Italian POWs during World War II, a general increase in juvenile offenders, and attendant internal conflicts among an increasingly diverse inmate population are also described in detail. 

The history narrative is followed by photos and comprehensive descriptions of inmate admissions and discharge processes; work assignments; recreation and education; and vocational training in farming, architectural drafting, bookbinding, furniture making, and typewriter repair. During the war, the reformatory was a major manufacturer of cargo nets for the U.S. Army, producing more than ten thousand nets in 1945 at a cost of only $3,654. 

Among other points of interest are photographs of “Santa” handing out Christmas cigarettes and candy to inmates and posing with staff. 

The album, intended to be read “landscape style,” with the spine along the top, opens with a hand-stenciled title page, and its sturdy leaves are adorned throughout with neatly drawn line borders and original photographs embedded in the text. The text is the typed original. Among the photos are aerial views of the complex and interior shots of practically all the reformatory buildings, including racially segregated dorms, cell blocks, clean and efficient medical facilities, the commissary, the visitors’ lounge with unexpectedly dainty wicker furniture, and original photos of the tents and farmhouses that predated construction of the modern reformatory buildings. 

The author/assembler of the album, and the album’s original purpose, are unknown, though the narrative’s level of detail and tone of pride strongly suggest an insider’s firsthand knowledge and a vested interest in advocating to an intended audience of potentially skeptical outsiders. The name of the wife (“Mrs. C. O. Nicholson”) of the reformatory’s warden at the time of the album’s creation is penciled at the top of one the first pages, suggesting the album was in her personal possession. Somehow, at an unknown date, the album found its way into the collection of the El Paso, Texas, Public Library, which transferred it to the Library of Virginia in 1981. 

Provenance:
Donated, 1981 

Related resources and collections:
C1: 127 Hopewell Locals of United Mine Workers of America Photograph Collection
C1: 151 State Penitentiary Photograph Collection