Leisure in Wartime: An Historic Photograph Preservation Initiative

FAIN: PG-233207-16

Appalachian Mountain Club (Boston, MA 02129-3740)
Rebecca Maxwell Fullerton (Project Director: April 2015 to September 2017)

The purchase of archival housing supplies and storage shelving for some of the most sensitive items in the Appalachian Mountain Club’s collections, approximately 2,100 photographs documenting tourism and outdoor recreation in America from the 1920s through the 1950s. Focused primarily on the New England region, the collections provide a notable visual record of outdoor leisure activities and how they were impacted by two world wars. They are used for publications, research, and public programming across a number of disciplines, including history and environmental science.

The project will focus on AMC's Photographic Print collections and one newly-accessioned special collection of photographs. These images document outdoor recreation, tourism and close-to-home adventure in the Northeastern United States. They date from the 1930s through the end of World War II. They offer a visual record detailing the changes in travel and leisure behavior as the war approached and began to impact life due to travel restrictions, rationing, and conscription. Our specific goal within this project is to stabilize and appropriately house images determined to be in greatest need of immediate preservation and to add improved storage shelving to our Archives space to house this and other collections.