Library of Congress purchases 500 Civil War photos from grandmother collector

The Library of Congress has just added a treasure trove of historical photographs to their collection, 500 photographs of Civil War era, the pre to post war era from slavery, the actual war and President Abraham Lincoln's funeral. The nation's library announced the purchase of the collection, on Friday, March 27, 2015. The collection took four decades to collect, the loving work of a now 87-year-old grandmother from Houston, Texas. The purchase comes at the end of the 150th anniversary of the Civil War.

The Library of Congress actually made the purchase in December 2014 and only made it public now. Bob Zeller, president of the Center for Civil War Photography commented on the plantation photographs, "They're just tremendously significant. These are not post-war.... or after Union occupation. These are actual scenes of slavery in America." The majority of the photos are "stereo pictures" which are "two shots of the same scene printed on an oblong card that was designed to be seen in 3-D through a stereo viewer." The Library of Congress has already digitalized seventy-seven of the images, and made available on the Library of Congress' website. The collection however, has "thousands" of photos, with 70 percent three-dimensional views.

The 87-year-old grandmother Robin Stanford had been collecting the photos for four decades, since the 1970s. Stanford a history buff "attended Randolph-Macon Woman's College," which now "Randolph College, in Lynchburg, Va." became seriously interested in history in 1950s, while her eldest son was a toddler. Soon her hobby of reading about history specifically the Civil War grew. In the 1970s as she was looking, to decorate her family's new farmhouse she found an old stereo viewer and some photos, bought the set for $20 dollars and then kept on collecting. Stanford remarked, "And you know how it is with collecting. You put your toe in the water, and next thing you know, you're paddling like crazy."

The collection focuses primarily on Texas and the Civil War. Among the items included are a series depicting slavery before the war, Fort Sumter, South Carolina after it fell to the Confederates in 1961, "Abraham Lincoln's funeral cortege," the abandoned Battle of the Wilderness site. Helena Zinkham, the "head of LOC's prints and photographs division," "We're benefiting from [Stanford's] 40 years of careful collecting. We have .?.?. more than 7,000 original glass plate negatives from the Civil War. These are cards for which the negatives didn't survive." These photos were part of a fade that attempted to capture 3-D images, and view more details, they were created by having "two lenses about as far apart as a pair of human eyes. Prints were made on light cardboard for use in the stereo viewer."

Stanford was collecting the photos for her son John, "a professor of astronomy and physics at Concordia University Texas in Austin" who shared her love of history. His "sudden" death last year prompted Stanford to start selling off the collection, first for financial reasons for her family, but now she decided to the whole collection. Each piece is valued at around a thousand dollars. Stanford expressed, "I'm so glad they're here, because they will be available for everybody. On the other hand, I'm going to miss them."

Bonnie K. Goodman is the Editor of the Academic Buzz Network, a series of political, academic & education blogs which includes History Musings: History, News & Politics. She has a BA in History & Art History & a Masters in Library and Information Studies, both from McGill University, and has done graduate work in Jewish history at Concordia University as part of the MA in Judaic Studies program. She covers US, Canadian & Israeli politics, with a particular focus on the Obama presidency, Congress, domestic policy, and elections.