“We carry with us precious memorials”: Early Harvard class photograph albums
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Citation Banta, Melissa. 2016. “We carry with us precious memorials”: Early Harvard class photograph albums. Harvard Library Bulletin 26 (3), Fall 2015: 4-30.
Citable link https://nrs.harvard.edu/URN-3:HUL.INSTREPOS:37363310
Terms of Use This article was downloaded from Harvard University’s DASH repository, and is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth at http:// nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of- use#LAA “We Carry With Us Precious Memorials”: Early Harvard Class Photograph Albums
Melissa Banta
hanks to the aid of photography we are enabled, “ as we take leave of each other to day, to carry with us precious memorials of college associations and college friendships,” Charles Carroll Tower, T 1 Harvard Class of 1855, wrote. With the introduction of photography in the mid- nineteenth century, Harvard graduates could remember their college years with a new fdelity—whether through evocative portraits of classmates and faculty or graceful scenes of Harvard Yard. Harvard commissioned photographers from prestigious studios in Cambridge and Boston, a bustling center of photographic activity and innovation, to take the class pictures. Te earliest portraits of graduating seniors, created in 1852, were daguerreotypes, unique images on a silver plate. From 1853 to 1864, class photographs took the form of salted paper prints, the frst negative-to-positive technique. Year by year, photographers perfected the science and artistry of this pioneering process, producing beautifully composed images with remarkable detail and tonal rendition (see fgure 2.1). Te seniors assembled the images into custom-made albums that started as simple notebooks and by the 1860s transformed into handsome, gilt-edged tomes. Te evolution of class albums refect the tender ways in which students embraced the art of photography to commemorate this formative period of their lives for themselves and for posterity—at the moment when Harvard itself was transitioning from a provincial college into a major university.
“The First Class to Set the Example”: 1852
“ ’52 was the frst Harvard Class to set the example which has ever since been followed,” the Annals of the Harvard Class of 1852 noted. “Te pictures were of course daguerreotypes . . . [I]t is a signifcant fact that eighty-fve men should have thought
1 Charles Carroll Tower, “Photography,” Commencement Essay, July 16, 1856. HUC 6856.
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HLB 26-3 Harvard Archives BOOK final.indb 4 12/29/2016 6:41:06 PM Figure 2.1. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Class of 1861 Album. George Kendall Warren, salted paper print, 1861. Oval 15.4 x 12.2 cm on an album page, 31.8 cm. HUD 261.04.4 F.
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HLB 26-3 Harvard Archives BOOK final.indb 5 12/29/2016 6:41:06 PM it worth while to make the trip to town for the purpose of sitting.” 2 The seniors traveled to Boston to the sky-lit studio of John Adams Whipple, located among printing presses and pub- lishing houses on Washington Street, where the photographer took a daguerreotype of each student. Te technique involved sensitizing a silver-coated copper plate with iodide, exposing the plate in the camera, and then developing the image with mercury vapor. Whipple combined a technical and mechanical ingenuity with a distinct artistic style, and the clear, luminous quality of his Figure 2.2. Rufus Choate, Class of 1852. John Adams 1852 daguerreotype portraits Whipple, daguerreotype, 1852. 7 x 8 cm. HUD 252.716 vt. represents a stunning example of artistry and innovation. “Perhaps [the senior] will never again enjoy all the advantages with none of the drawbacks of being a personage so fully as now,” James Russell Lowell, Harvard professor of modern languages, wrote. “He is the leading fgure in this little world.” 3 To capture this feeting moment in the graduates’ lives, Whipple employed one of his newly patented techniques, “crayon portraiture.” He positioned a light screen behind the sitter, and in front of the camera lens he placed a card with an aperture, which he moved around slightly as he took the exposure. Te method created a difused, sof, vignette efect. Whipple produced the daguerreotypes as sixth plates, which measured 2¾ by 3¼ inches. Te entire set of eighty-fve Class of 1852 daguerreotypes ft into a beautifully designed, custom-made chest of wooden drawers, each drawer holding twelve plates (see fgure 2.2). Students usually entered Harvard at age seventeen, a “herd of raw, half informed, half instructed boys,” one journalist remarked, who transformed into “well informed,
2 Grace Williamson Edes, Annals of the Harvard Class of 1852 (Cambridge: Privately printed, 1922), 272. 3 James Russell Lowell, “Class Day,” in Te Harvard Book: A Series of Historical, Biographical, and Description Sketches, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Welch, Bigelow, and Company, 1875), 2:170.
6 “We Carry With Us Precious Memorials”
HLB 26-3 Harvard Archives BOOK final.indb 6 12/29/2016 6:41:06 PM well bred men, useful members of society, if not indeed, its leaders.” 4 Nearly half of the Class of 1852 would become lawyers, and others went on to careers as clergymen and physicians. Eight graduates would die in the Civil War, on the Union and Confederate sides. But on the eve of graduation, the portraits reveal breezy, jovial characters, who as Joseph Choate, Class of 1852, remembered, were “[b]lessed with all the spirits of youth with no responsibilities, no cares, and with only the inspiration of our individual ambition.” 5 Te daguerreotype was a one-of-a-kind image, though photographers could take a copy daguerreotype of an original plate if they wanted to create a copy in the form of another daguerreotype. For the Harvard portraits, however, Whipple decided to use the salt print process, the frst negative-to-positive photographic technique, introduced by the Englishman William Henry Fox Talbot in 1839. By making a negative of each daguerreotype, Whipple could generate multiple paper copies of the portraits. Early salt prints tended to exhibit the fbrous quality of both the paper negative and the resulting paper print. Glass-plate negatives, however, improved the sharpness of the image. In one of Whipple’s inventions, he coated a glass-plate negative with albumen from eggs, which he found to be the best bonding agent to adhere light- sensitive chemicals to the glass-plate.6 Whipple referred to the albumen glass-plate negatives and resulting prints as “crystalotypes,” alluding to the improved clarity of the images. Te photographer patented his formula, which he publicized widely in advertisements for his studio (see fgure 2.3).7 Not only did the paper copies of class daguerreotype portraits symbolize precious mementos for fellow classmates, they also inspired the frst class albums at Harvard, which initially took the form of small notebooks. A class committee took responsibility for assembling the images into an ofcial class volume, which the college librarian advised placing in the newly established University Archives. During reunions, commencements, and other festivities, graduates could return to view the class album in the Archives, which housed university and alumni records.8
4 Te Monthly Chronicle 2, no. 1 (Boston: Samuel N. Dickinson, 1841): 67. 5 Edward Sandford Martin, Te Life of Joseph Hodges Choate, 2 vols. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1921), 1:74. 6 Claude Felix Abel Niépce de Saint Victor in France and the Langenheim brothers in Philadelphia were experimenting with the egg albumen binders on glass-plate negatives at this time as well. 7 See United States Patent No. 7458. 8 Classes before 1852 also created albums of graduate portraits years afer their graduation. At a meeting on commencement day in 1867, the class of 1844, for example, proposed “to procure a photograph of each member of the Class, and to preserve the same in an album.” See “Te Class Album,” Te Class of 1844, Harvard College: Fify Years’ Afer Graduation. (Cambridge, Mass.: John Wilson and Son, University Press, 1896), 344.
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HLB 26-3 Harvard Archives BOOK final.indb 7 12/29/2016 6:41:06 PM Figure 2.3. Title page and portrait of Horatio Alger, Class of 1852 Album. John Adams Whipple, crystalotype print, copy of daguerreotype, 1852. 5.6 x 4.7 cm on an album page, 15.5 cm. HUD 252.705p.
Te practice of adding later portraits to the ofcial class album was also encouraged. In 1863, the 1852 class committee wrote, “It is now proposed to form, for the archives of the Class, a collection of photographs of its members, taken at diferent times since its graduation. Each member is expected to send to the class-secretary, or to bring in person on Commencement Day, copies of such card-photographs of himself as he may have had taken at any time, and to do his part in the future toward keeping up the collection.” 9 Next to the young face of Horatio Alger, Class of 1852, noted as the smallest boy in the class and the “President’s Freshman” (a student who performed errands for a small stipend), is a portrait taken twenty years later, at which time Alger had become a celebrated author of juvenile literature. Te practice became formalized and invited intriguing before and afer comparisons. As an anonymous writer leafng through an 1855 class album observed, “Te hair may whiten, the beard may conceal
9 Horace H. Coolidge, Henry G. Denny, and Calvin G. Page, Class Committee Notes to the Class of 1852 (Boston: Harvard College, June 15, 1863), 1.
8 “We Carry With Us Precious Memorials”
HLB 26-3 Harvard Archives BOOK final.indb 8 12/29/2016 6:41:07 PM Figure 2.4. Horatio Alger, Class of 1852 Album. John Adams Whipple, crystalotype print, copy of daguerreotype, 1852. Oval 4.8 x 4 cm. Unknown photographer, albumen print, 1872. 9.3 x 5.7 cm on an album page, 26.8 cm. HUD 252.808p.
the familiar lines of the face, the form may bow, but the eye does not change in color or in expression” (see fgure 2.4).10 Interested graduates could also order their own custom-made volumes. Joseph Hodges Choate, Harvard Class of 1852, recalled the feelings of afection his class album evoked. “No friendships of afer-life began to equal in ardor and intensity those of college days . . . I have in my bedroom the photographs of eighty-fve of our members . . . in all the beauty and freshness of youth, just as they appeared on Commencement Day in 1852 . . . I ofen put myself to sleep by calling the roll of my classmates, whose names are as familiar now as then.” 11
10 Anonymous, Harvard Advocate 35, no. 7 (May 11, 1883): 80. 11 Choate, quoted in Martin, Te Life of Joseph Hodges Choate, 1:74.
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HLB 26-3 Harvard Archives BOOK final.indb 9 12/29/2016 6:41:08 PM Evolving Narratives: 1853–1860
John Adams Whipple continued to take the Harvard class portraits throughout the 1850s, ofen accompanied by James Wallace Black, who worked in Whipple’s studio in the early 1850s and as his partner from 1856 to 1859.12 Whipple and Black’s business grew into one of the major Boston photography frms, rivaling the prestigious studio of Southworth and Hawes. Black was held in high regard for his collegiality and enthusiasm as a photography instructor, and Whipple invested time and money in a variety of experiments to advance the medium (see fgure 2.5).13 “Mr. Whipple . . . saw the great commercial advantages of the collodion process over the Daguerreotype, and he grafed it on the elder branch of photography almost as soon as it was introduced,” English photographer John Werge noted in 1853.14 Professionals and amateurs alike visited Whipple and Black’s studio to learn the art of photography and particularly to see the team’s latest advances with glass-plate negatives and paper prints. Harvard visitors included Librarian of Harvard College, John Sibley, who expressed his gratitude to Black for giving “me the details of his chemical experiments & discouragements and successes.” 15 William T. Brigham, Class of 1862, also studied at Whipple’s studio, where he recalled “learning the practice of that most useful art.” 16 Whipple and Black needed to produce an enormous quantity of prints for each graduating class as the number of seniors from 1852 to 1864 generally ranged from eighty to one hundred students. Afer the photographers processed their glass-plate negatives, they clamped them into wooden printing frames, covered the emulsion side with light-sensitive paper, and brought the frames to the studio roofop to be developed by the sunlight. Harvard professor, doctor, and photograph enthusiast Oliver Wendell Holmes visited Whipple and Black’s studio and remembered the factory-like nature of
12 Whipple served as class photographer until 1860. Black become partners with Perez M. Batchelder, an itinerant daguerreotypist; their frm, Black & Batchelder, created the 1860 Harvard class portraits. 13 Whipple and Black secured a number of photographic assignments with Harvard. In 1851, Whipple took daguerreotypes of the moon through the telescope at the Harvard College Observatory, one of the largest telescopes in the world at the time. His luminous images represented a breakthrough in astronomical photography. Whipple also created some of the earliest medical pathology photographs at the request of Harvard physician Dr. Henry Jacob Bigelow. 14 John Werge, quoted in William Wellington, Photography in America: Te Formative Years 1839– 1900 (New York: Tomas U. Crowell, 1978), 100. 15 John Langdon Sibley, Sibley’s Private Journal, entry for November 19, 1864.
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HLB 26-3 Harvard Archives BOOK final.indb 10 12/29/2016 6:41:08 PM Figure 2.5. Phillips Brooks, Class of 1855 Album, belonging to Edward H. Browne. John Adams Whipple, salted paper print, 1855. Oval 8.9 x 6.8 cm on an album page, 22.2 cm. HUD 255.705.2.
the printing process: “A photographic printer will have ffy or more pictures printing at once, and he keeps going up and down the line, opening the frames to look and see how they are getting on.” 17 When the developing was complete, the photographers fxed the prints in a solution of hyposulfte of soda or “hypo.” Tis step removed the unexposed silver chloride, prevented further darkening of the image, and resulted in a reasonably permanent print. Te succession of Harvard albums year by year reveals the technical heights and artistic sensibility Whipple and Black achieved in the early days of the medium. By testing a variety of negative supports, for example, they were able to create images of increasing sharpness (in contrast to the matte, fbrous appearance of early salt prints). Like other photographers of the day, the team found that toning the prints with gold chloride produced photographs with greater image permanence as well as a cooler
17 Oliver Wendell Holmes. “Doings of the Sunbeam,” in Soundings from the Atlantic (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1864), 246.
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HLB 26-3 Harvard Archives BOOK final.indb 11 12/29/2016 6:41:08 PM Figure 2.6. Amos H. Johnson, Class of 1853 Album. Figure 2.7. Atherton Blight, Class of 1854 Album. John Adams Whipple, salted paper print coated John Adams Whipple, salted paper print, 1854. with gum arabic, 1853. Oval 9.2 x 7.3 cm on an Oval 9.4 x 7.4 cm on an album page, 24.7 cm. album page, 25 cm. HUD 253.705 P. HUD 254.704.3.
tonality. Tey also experimented with a variety of coatings in order to create prints with superior sharpness and defnition (see fgure 2.6). Whipple and Black cut the fnal prints into an oval shape (perhaps conforming to the look of the oval mats used for the 1852 daguerreotypes) and continued to adhere to and experiment with this elegant, elliptical format in the ensuing years (see fgure 2.7). Harvard students put their best face forward in Whipple and Black’s sky-lit studio, usually dressed in a high choker collar shirt, tie, and waistcoat. “My Photograph was taken this morning by Whipple & Black . . . ,” James Mairs Freeman, Class of 1859, recorded in his diary. “I hope my whiskers have grown enough to present a comfortable show” (see fgure 2.8).18 Te photographers had earned a reputation for putting their sitters at ease, as the American Journal of Photography noted: “Many have wondered how it is that Mr. Whipple’s pictures so generally have a pleasant expression. Perhaps if the public could hear him tell a few little stories while the sitter is eyeing the camera, the wonder could cease.” 19 Te photographer H. J. Rodgers explained that Black “can call out the loveliest and best mood of his sitters, the beauty of expression and emotion.
18 James Mairs Freeman, Class of 1859, Diary, entry for Friday April 22, 1859. HUD 862.29, box 1701. 19 “Photography in Boston,” American Journal of Photography n.s. 6, no. 14 (January 15, 1864): 323.
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HLB 26-3 Harvard Archives BOOK final.indb 12 12/29/2016 6:41:08 PM Figure 2.8. James M. Freeman, Class of 1859 Album. John Adams Whipple and James Wallace Black, salted paper print coated with dextrin, 1859. Oval 14.5 x 11.3 cm on an album page, 32.3 cm. HUD 259.704.3 p/PF.
Te natural courtesy and gentlemanly attention which he unafectedly pays visitors to his establishment, make him the favorite at the ‘Hub’” (see fgure 2.9).20 Like other renowned photographic galleries of the day, the studio approached the medium as a serious art that ofered a window into human character, and their beautifully executed portraits of beloved classmates and teachers became treasured keepsakes for Harvard seniors. Over time, graduates introduced additional material into their albums, constructing new pictorial narratives that told of their evolving lives and special connection to one another. Benjamin Cutler Clark Jr., Class of 1854, pasted a small newspaper notice next to a photo of E. J. Tenney that related the sad fate of his classmate “with a future all bright and glowing before him.” Tenney tragically lost his life not long afer graduation on the steamer Te San Francisco that sank in December 1854 (see fgure 2.10). Te
20 H. J. Rodgers, Twenty-Tree Years Under a Sky-Light, Or, Life and Experiences of a Photographer (Hartford, Conn.: H. J. Rogers: 1872), 25.
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HLB 26-3 Harvard Archives BOOK final.indb 13 12/29/2016 6:41:08 PM Figure 2.9. Louis Agassiz, Class of 1858 Album. John Adams Whipple and James Wallace Black, salted paper print coated with gum arabic, 1858. Oval 19.2 x 14.1 cm on an album page, 32.5 cm. HUD 258.704.1 F.
lifelong associations the graduates had with one another also prompted them to place later portraits of their classmates over time into the ofcial class volume as well as their own custom albums. In an 1855 volume, the class picture of Teodore Lyman is accompanied by a photograph of Lyman in Civil War uniform and another of Lyman taken years later (see fgures 2.11a and 2.11b). In the nineteenth century, “Harvard was a small, self-contained community . . . ruled by rituals and codes of its own,” historian Oscar Handlin contends. Tese daily ritual and codes cemented deep bonds among the class members as well as administrators and faculty. 21 Students in the mid-1800s attended morning prayers, took requisite classes (in history, Greek, Latin, French, rhetoric, natural history, philosophy, mathematics, science, chemistry, and physics), and fnished the day with evening prayers. Many faculty members lived in homes nearby in Cambridge, and
21 Oscar Handlin, “Making Men of the Boys,” Glimpses of the Harvard Past (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986), 99.
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HLB 26-3 Harvard Archives BOOK final.indb 14 12/29/2016 6:41:08 PM Figure 2.10. E. G. Tenney, Class of 1853 Album, belonging to Benjamin Culter Clark Jr. John Adams Whipple, salted paper print, 1853. Oval 9.1 x 7.3 cm on an album page, 24.8 cm. HUD 253.706.
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HLB 26-3 Harvard Archives BOOK final.indb 15 12/29/2016 6:41:09 PM Figure 2.11a. Teodore Lyman, Class of 1855 Album. Sonrel, albumen print, 1864. Allen & Rowell, albumen print, 1880. Album page, 22.2 cm. HUD 255.705.2A.
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HLB 26-3 Harvard Archives BOOK final.indb 16 12/29/2016 6:41:09 PM Figure 2.11b. Teodore Lyman, Class of 1855 Album. John Adams Whipple, salted paper print coated with gum arabic, 1855. Oval 8.9 x 6.8 cm on an album page, 22.2 cm. HUD 255.705.2A.
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HLB 26-3 Harvard Archives BOOK final.indb 17 12/29/2016 6:41:09 PM within this close-knit community, professors and students enjoyed informal contact with one another. Charles Eliot, an 1853 graduate and later president of Harvard, fondly recalled professor of anatomy Jefries Wyman: “I loved & admired Prof. Wyman more than any teacher I have ever had & more than any man of science I have ever known.” 22 By the mid-1850s, portraits of Harvard presidents and faculty—among them a growing number of distinguished scholars, such as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Louis Agassiz, and Oliver Wendell Holmes—flled the class albums. Whipple and Black’s sensitive portraits served as valued mementos of inspirational teachers and mentors within the Harvard community, described by Francis French, Class of 1857, as “a little world by itself” (see fgure 2.12).23 In addition to portraiture, Whipple and Black mastered the art of architecture and landscape photography, and by the late 1850s the frm began taking pictures of the Harvard campus. Te photographers’ atmospheric scenes of Harvard Yard and Gore Hall (the Gothic-style library erected in 1844) presented students with “photographic memorials of . . . venerable halls, those pleasant grounds,” as Charles Carroll Tower, Class of 1856, remembered the studio’s pictures, adding “May they ever awaken within us pleasing memories of our Alma Mater!” (see fgure 2.13)24
Records for Posterity: 1861–1864
George Kendall Warren, who operated studios in Massachusetts (frst in Lowell and then in Cambridgeport) began taking portraits of Harvard graduating classes in 1861.25 Noted for his celebrity portraits, the entrepreneurial photographer also carved out a successful specialty as class photographer of Ivy League and elite colleges including Brown, Dartmouth, Princeton, Williams, and Yale. For the Harvard class albums, Warren created salt prints until 1865, when he switched to albumen. Introduced in
22 Charles W. Elliott to Morrill Wyman, September 17, 1874, quoted in Toby A. Appel, “A Scientifc Career in the Age of Character: Jefries Wyman and Natural History at Harvard,” in Science at Harvard University: Historical Perspectives, ed. Clark A. Elliott and Margaret W. Rossiter (London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1992), 113. 23 Francis French, Exeter and Harvard Eighty Years Ago: Journals and Letters of F. O. French ’57, ed. Amos Tuck French (Chester, N.H.: 1932), 69. 24 Tower, “Photography.” 25 George Kendall Warren also did a brisk business producing the popular cartes-de-visite format portraiture for the general public as well as the college classes. Te Harvard University Archives holds Warren’s class cartes-de-visite images in albums designed for the carte-de-visite format. William Notman, George Pach, and Napoleon Sarony took Harvard class photographs starting in the 1870s. For a history of the Harvard class albums, see Kimball C. Elkins, “Harvard Class Album Trough the Years,” Harvard Alumni Bulletin 57 (June 1955): 675–676.
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HLB 26-3 Harvard Archives BOOK final.indb 18 12/29/2016 6:41:09 PM Figure 2.12. Jefries Wyman, Class of 1858 Album. John Adams Whipple and James Wallace Black, salted paper print coated with gum arabic, 1858. Oval 14.2 x 10.9 cm on an album page, 34 cm. HUD 258.704.4
Figure 2.13. Gore Hall, Class of 1858 Album. John Adams Whipple and James Wallace Black, salted paper print coated with gum arabic, 1858. Oval 14 x 19.2 cm on an album page, 32.5 cm. HUD 258.704.1 F.
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HLB 26-3 Harvard Archives BOOK final.indb 19 12/29/2016 6:41:10 PM Figure 2.14. W. L. Pillsbury, Class of 1863 Album. George Kendall Warren, salted paper print, 1863. Oval 15.3 x 12 cm on an album page, 32.5 cm. HUD 263.04 Fa.
the early 1850s, albumen became the dominant form of photographic prints. Well past the period when most commercial photographers had abandoned salt prints, however, Warren continued to explore his own aesthetic through this early photographic technique, producing salt prints remarkable for their balance of subtle tones and distinct details (see fgure 2.14). Increasing numbers of graduates, whose likeness Warren captured, began to serve in the Civil War. “Many graduates of the recent classes responded instantly to the call of the country, and are serving in the feld,” Harvard President Cornelius C. Felton wrote in 1861. “Tey are among the bravest of the brave; not one has failed, whenever opportunity ofered, to show his readiness to lay down his life for his country.” 26 By the mid-1860s the carefree expressions of class portraits began to transform into serious,
26 C. C. Felton, “President’s Report,” Tirty-Six Annual Report of the President of Harvard University to the Overseers, Exhibiting the State of the Institution for the Academic Year 1860–1861 (Cambridge, Mass.: Welch, Bigelow, and Co., 1862), 4.
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HLB 26-3 Harvard Archives BOOK final.indb 20 12/29/2016 6:41:10 PM sober countenances.27 “Our class has been more than decimated,” the class secretary J. Edward Wright, Class of 1861, wrote. “Classmates, as our ranks grow thin, let the noble example of those who have fallen, inspire us to stand the more frmly together.” 28 Some students who fought for the Confederacy still maintained friendships with their northern classmates. William Perry, Class of 1859, wrote, “[I]n spite of the long and bloody war which has separated us and our sections, I still have pleasant recollections of my college days & my Alma Mater.” 29 In the Harvard class albums, poignant inscriptions, obituaries, and letters detailing where a graduate served or fell in battle appeared alongside the youthful portraits. Of William Yates Gholson, who lost his life leading the 104th Illinois, the class report reminisced, “[O]ur hearts swell with proud recollections of his many virtues, and melt with tender regrets at his early death.” 30 Te inscription next to Gholson’s class portrait notes simply that he was “killed age 21” (see fgure 2.15). Warren’s studio supplied an order form ofering a choice of portraits and views students could add to their custom-made yearbooks. Te studio cautioned, “It is necessary to get the order as soon as possible,” a reasonable request given the labor- intensive, time-consuming production process (see fgure 2.16).31 In addition to senior portraits, Warren ofered more than 100 additional images, including Harvard presidents, faculty, and staf; group shots of the entire class and student organizations; and campus scenes and views of Harvard Square. Students could chose pictures of fondly remembered campus fgures (sometimes accompanied by their professional wares) such as the candy boy, newsboy, janitor, and the “Goodies,” who provided housekeeping services (see fgures 2.17 and 2.18). As a token of afection, one Harvard student lef a request that his “efects might be bestowed on his friend, the Goody, who had been so attentive to him during his declining hours.” 32 Warren ofen reused his
27 For Commemoration Day 1865, Harvard issued the Roll of Students of Harvard College Who Have Served in the Army or Navy During the War of the Rebellion (Cambridge, Mass.: H. O. Houghton and Company, 1865). 28 J. Edward Wright, Class of 1861, First Triennial Report, July 20, 1864 (Cambridge, Mass.: Press of John Ford, , 1864), iv. 29 William Perry to class secretary, June 24, 1866, Class Book, 1859, quoted in Walter Braverman, “James Benjamin Clark and the Southern Experience at Harvard College in the Civil War Era,” Harvard Library Bulletin 34, no. 4 (Fall 1986): 414. 30 Harvard College, Class of 1861, First Triennial Report, July 20, 1864 (Cambridge, Mass.: Press of John Ford, 1864), 21. 31 A class committee arranged for the distribution of photographic prints for graduates, and the class bore the cost of creating the ofcial bound class album. 32 Harvard Register, 1827–1828: 86, quoted in Benjamin Homer Hall, A Collection of College Words and Customs (Cambridge, Mass.: J. Bartlett, 1856), 231.
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HLB 26-3 Harvard Archives BOOK final.indb 21 12/29/2016 6:41:10 PM Figure 2.15. W. H. Gholson, Class of 1861 Album, belonging to W. N. Forbes. George Kendall Warren, salted paper print, 1861. Oval 15.6 x 12.4 cm on an album page, 31.8 cm. HUD 261.04.2 F.
22 “We Carry With Us Precious Memorials”
HLB 26-3 Harvard Archives BOOK final.indb 22 12/29/2016 6:41:10 PM Figure 2.16. Reproduction of an order form, Studio of George Kendall Warren, Class of 1861 Album. Album 22.2 cm. HUD 261.04.2 F.
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HLB 26-3 Harvard Archives BOOK final.indb 23 12/29/2016 6:41:10 PM images of campus scenes, faculty, and staf from one year to the next, updating and adding photos as faculty members aged and new buildings appeared on campus.33 Like Whipple and Black, Warren demonstrated extraordinary skills in landscape photography. His class album order form included vistas of Mount Auburn Cemetery, a place of deep associations for the university. Located a mile and a half from Harvard, Mount Auburn was the frst landscaped rural cemetery in the country, a picturesque terrain of natural hills and dells with a breathtaking variety of trees and plants and a favorite haunt of students who referred to the site as “Sweet Auburn.” A hillside parcel of land donated to the university, known as Harvard Hill, was available for faculty members and students who did not have family lots at Mount Auburn or lived too far away to be returned home for burial. In the advancing years of the Civil War, increasing numbers of Harvard graduates and their relatives, many of whom died in the confict, came to be buried in lots throughout the cemetery (see fgure 2.19). Te class albums, flled with pictures of campus scenes as well as impressive new buildings, such as the College Observatory and Gore Hall, served as an inspirational record with which alumni could remember and support their alma mater (see fgure 2.20). From the early to mid-nineteenth century, the number of buildings on the Harvard campus grew from a handful to twenty, the library tripled its holdings, and fnancial contributions rose to unprecedented levels. By the mid-1860s, Harvard assumed its place as one of the area’s foremost educational and cultural institutions and a major benefciary of philanthropic giving. “In the days when Boston was the Athens of America, Harvard and Boston were tied very closely, fnancially, culturally, and socially,” author Peter French writes. “Te great Boston families . . . sent their sons to Harvard and built up its endowments.” 34 Portraits of Harvard faculty by Warren also lent a professional aura to the growing number of endowed professorships and faculty in emerging specialized disciplines in the sciences and humanities. “Te desire for personal improvement, a thirst for knowledge, the ambition to rise in the world by association with Harvard’s prestige, the great names among the faculty, and the cultural reputation of Cambridge lured the young men there,” Handlin argues.35 Faculty and students alike took their position among the esteemed pages of the Harvard class albums (see fgure 2.21). Te size of the class album expanded through the years, from a simple 1852 notebook measuring 3¾ by 6 by ½ inches to an 1864 volume measuring 10 by 13 by 3 inches. Te leather-bound class albums throughout the 1850s and 1860s began to
33 Photographers who took Harvard’s class portraits in later years sometimes appropriated Warren’s images, stamping their own name on the back of the prints. 34 Peter French, Te Long Reach: A Report on Harvard Today (New York: I. Washburn, 1962), 208. 35 Handlin, 60.
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HLB 26-3 Harvard Archives BOOK final.indb 24 12/29/2016 6:41:10 PM Figure 2.17. Niccoline, Candy Boy, Class of 1861 Album. George Kendall Warren, salted paper print, 1861, Oval 11.5 x 8.9 cm on an album page, 32 cm. HUD 261.04.4 F.
Figure 2.18. College “Goodies,” Class of 1862 Album. George Kendall Warren, salted paper print, 1862. Oval 13.4 x 18.5 cm on an album page, 32.4 cm. HUD 262.04 F.
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HLB 26-3 Harvard Archives BOOK final.indb 25 12/29/2016 6:41:11 PM Figure 2.19. Mount Auburn Cemetery, Class of 1861 Album. George Kendall Warren, salted paper print, 1861. Oval, 20.5 x 15.5 cm on an album page, 32.3 cm. HUD 261.04 F.
Figure 2.20. Harvard College Observatory, Class of 1861 Album. George Kendall Warren, salted paper print, 1861. Oval 15.4 x 20.6 cm on an album page, 32 cm. HUD 261.04.
26 “We Carry With Us Precious Memorials”
HLB 26-3 Harvard Archives BOOK final.indb 26 12/29/2016 6:41:11 PM Figure 2.21. Asa Gray, Class of 1863 Album. George Kendall Warren, salted paper print, 1863. Oval 15.4 x 12 cm on an album page, 33.2 cm. HUD 263.04 Fa.
exhibit elaborate bindings with embossed designs, inside covers lined with marbled paper, decorative titles, and gilt-edged pages. Interested in preserving the albums for future generations, graduates ofen bequeathed the treasured tomes to family members, to other classmates, or to their alma mater, where they were placed in the University Archives by the college librarian, a step which accounts for the sizeable
Melissa Banta 27
HLB 26-3 Harvard Archives BOOK final.indb 27 12/29/2016 6:41:12 PM collection in the Archives today.36 “Photography . . . act[ed] as a convenient glue to help bond collective identities and to paste them into their rightful places in the general scheme of the great and the good,” photograph historian Roger Hargreaves writes.37 Te increasingly elegant and voluminous class albums embodied this sense of prestige and the graduates’ collective, lifelong connection to it (see fgure 2.22). Te early Harvard class photograph albums represented a collaborative act of commemoration between photographic artists who strove for artistic and technical excellence in the early days of the medium and Harvard students who assembled portraits and views into a collective context to which they continued to add new layers of meaning. By 1864, while the elegant tomes refected the growing prominence of the university, they never lost their intimate nature. As one graduate mused,
Just hand me my album, the class one, my dear, It’s a long time since I’ve seen the old faces, I fear. My honest old class-mates, dispersed far and wide, Drifing ever apart on eternity’s tide.38
Te albums endured as a deeply evocative association to beloved people and places, a record of pride and prestige, and a cumulative narrative of mid-nineteenth-century Harvard—embodying, as Joseph Choate remembered, “Harvard College, with its delightful memories and associations, its lofy and well-maintained standards, and its ever-growing greatness, . . . the best and most wholesome infuence upon my life” (see fgure 2.23).39
36 By the turn of the century, the volumes had become unwieldy and were supplanted by printed versions. Te frst of the modern yearbooks, these publications lacked the more personalized characteristics of the custom-made volumes. 37 Roger Hargreaves, “Putting Faces to the Names: Social and Celebration Portrait Photography,” in Te Beautiful and the Damned: Te Creation of Identity in Nineteenth Century Photography, ed. Peter Hamilton and Roger Hargreaves (Aldershot, Hampshire; Burlington, Vt.: Lund Humphries in Association with the National Portrait Gallery, 2001), 54. 38 “Senior Dinner Poem,” Te Harvard Advocate 46, no. 7 (January 14, 1889): 103. 39 Choate, quoted in Martin, Te Life of Joseph Hodges, 1:78.
28 “We Carry With Us Precious Memorials”
HLB 26-3 Harvard Archives BOOK final.indb 28 12/29/2016 6:41:12 PM Figure 2.22. Cover and Title Page, Class of 1864 Album. Title page 32.2 x 25 cm. HUD 264.04.2.
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HLB 26-3 Harvard Archives BOOK final.indb 29 12/29/2016 6:41:13 PM Figure 2.23. Harvard Yard, Class of 1863 Album. George Kendall Warren, salted paper print, 1863. Oval 15.3 x 20.4 cm on an album page, 33 cm. HUD 263.04 Fa F.
30 “We Carry With Us Precious Memorials”
HLB 26-3 Harvard Archives BOOK final.indb 30 12/29/2016 6:41:14 PM Contributors
Melissa Banta is Projects Curator at Weissman Preservation Center, Harvard Library.
Kate Bowers is Collections Services Archivist for Metadata, Systems, and Standards at Harvard University Archives, Harvard Library.
Elena Bulat is Photograph Conservator for Special Collections at Weissman Preservation Center, Harvard Library.
Megan Sniffin-Marinoff is University Archivist at Harvard University Archives, Harvard Library.
Caroline Tanski is Holdings Management Associate at Harvard University Archives, Harvard Library.
Harvard Library Bulletin 83
HLB 26-3 Harvard Archives BOOK final.indb 83 12/29/2016 6:41:37 PM