Photograph Collections Rehousing

FAIN: PG-263598-19

Harriet Beecher Stowe Center (Hartford, CT 06105-3243)
Elizabeth Giard Burgess (Project Director: May 2018 to March 2021)

Purchasing preservation housing and storage supplies for the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center’s Photograph Collection, as recommended by Northeast Document Conservation Center (NEDCC) conservators. The collection holds 12,000 items dating from 1840 to the present, with 4,500 images documenting the life of Stowe, writer of the influential abolitionist novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and her extended family. Other holdings include fifty photographs of Uncle Tom’s Cabin stage and screen dramatizations that capture racial, stereotypical imagery in the 19^th and 20^th centuries, as well as 4,900 photographs and negatives from the 1970s that document historic buildings during Hartford’s urban renewal. The contents are widely used for scholarly and educational study.

This request to the National Endowment for the Humanities for a $6,000 Preservation Assistance Grant is to support purchasing preservation housing and storage supplies for the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center’s (HBSC) Photograph Collection as recommended by Northeast Document Conservation Center (NEDCC) conservators Mary Todd Glaser, Deborah Wender, Monique C. Fischer in an assessment of the Library Collection.