When you hear hoofbeats – sometimes they are zebras!

Author: Linda Woodland, Archival Field Fellow

I was placed with the Swift River Valley Historical Society, an organization committed to preserving the memory of the towns drowned to form the Quabbin Reservoir in 1938. As a transplant to Central Massachusetts, and now a resident in the Wachusett Reservoir area, I have long been curious about this drastic decision made in the early 20th century to displace residents of these quiet valleys for the sake of Boston and their drinking water. The kick off began with meeting Dot Frye, the Museum Administrator of SRVHS, and Roving Archivist Sarah-Jane Poindexter, as well as many members of the SRVHS Board and the Massachusetts Archives. It was a warm reception and crash course in the larger collection, repository’s administration, and history of the region.

Kickoff of the Archival Field Fellowship. Pictured [l to r]: Dot Frye; Judith McIntosh; John Warner Jr.; Linda Woodland; Tom Doyle; SRVHS Board Member; Sarah-Jane Poindexter

The collection I was tasked to process was to be 300 or so glass plate negatives, presumed to show life in the 1920s-1930s. These haunting pictures show residents later displaced, as well as locations either moved to higher ground or now under water. These first few days at SRVHS started with gathering the boxes of glass plates that had been dispersed to volunteers over the years for printing. The majority of the plates were separated from their original donations, which is typical, but the state-of-the-art vault they are stored in is anything but typical for historical societies that dot the hills of Central and Western Massachusetts. The temperature and humidity controlled vault has done a huge service for these sometimes volatile and inconsistently wrapped artifacts. I decided that rehousing at the time of inventory would be the most responsible method of processing since the emulsion is fragile and at risk for damage through overhandling.

Unwrapping once, recording information in a spreadsheet, applying an item number, then immediately rehousing the glass in a 4-flap and acid-free folder for later arrangement was the most straightforward way to manage preservation needs while processing.

I started with a box of plates that appeared to be the most at-risk – stacked glass, wrapped in patterned paper towels. Warned to expect mostly damaged negatives, I was excited to find that the majority of the plates retain a decipherable image. The 100th glass plate brought with it a link to an accession record and a possible photographer identified – Daniel T. Pierce, an amateur photographer who lived in the early 1900s. The portraits are carefully composed with dress and setting in mind, and the composition of the group portraits in fields showed creativity and a sense of humor on the part of the photographer and subjects.

The 100th glass plate, showing a group of 4 people posed somewhat casually outdoors, is not quite representative of the collection. The vast majority of the collection are studio portraits in front of backdrops – something I did not know at this early stage of processing.

After several days of rehousing glass plates I came across my first in-person example of cellulose nitrate film in the wild. These were grouped in a box of a newspaper clipping, various sizes of glass plates, a matted photograph, and general wrapping materials. Looking at the edges I saw a few alarming marks – v-shaped notches along the upper right corners. As nitrate film is known to spontaneously combust, I used the recommendations from the National Park Service’s Conserve-o-grams, Library of Congress, and other resources to separate all of the film into a separate document box. Low temperature, low humidity, and ventilation are the key pieces to balance in order to maintain a safer environment. Eventually, the negatives should be properly digitized and stored or disposed of through donation to another repository with more resources for volatile materials.

 Edge markings on cellulose film come in a variety of combinations, sometimes a single v or u, sometimes a mixture of both, and sometimes just the words “Kodak safety film.”

One day, about 400 or so glass plates into rehousing, I stood up to stretch while working on one very silvery plate, and suddenly caught a positive image! I went through one after another, inspecting from this new angle, and found more and more – and realized that there must have been so many others like this uncased daguerreotype in the collection. When I started processing, it seemed prudent to operate under the assumption that the collection was as described – glass plate negatives – and that any deviations from my expectations could be chalked up to my inexperience. I thought “when I hear hoofbeats, think horses not zebras,” meaning that I should assume this collection would be of the most common type of photographic glass plates found today, mass-produced dry plate negatives.

3 views of 2024.01.466, 5×7”, undated. These positive, silver photographic images proved to be something more exotic to this 21st-century student!

Knowing that daguerreotypes fell out of favor with the advent of other photographic processes, I researched how to identify other glass plates to see if this collection contains a chronology of photographic glass plates here. Indeed, I had already noted many plates looked underexposed, with milky and almost sepia tones. I began placing glass plates against a black background, and it was confirmed – this collection is mostly ambrotypes, most likely pre-1900, and amazing.

Ambrotypes change from negative to positive when backed with white vs black. It feels like a magic trick every single time. A studio portrait of a young girl, unidentified (5×7”) and the Whitaker-Clary house (8×10”), both undated.

This collection turns out to be a complete mixture of daguerreotypes, ambrotypes, and dry plate negatives – an entire chronology of photographic glass plate history. What’s more, this mixture of photographic processes is completely indicative of American photography habits. So many of the plates show the same exact composition across all 3 of these types of photographic glass plates, which is how studio photographers sometimes made copies of earlier photographs.

Now that SRVHS has a complete count of their photographic glass plates collection (including a newly discovered, but unprocessed box of more than 200 glass plates) with formats and general subjects recorded, digitization seems like a natural next step. These images provide a depth of understanding of life irrevocably changed for the sake of others, a view of the everyday, and the value these residents placed on recording history through photography. I’m glad to have been part of making this story accessible for whatever future historians see when they look under the waters of the Quabbin Reservoir.

Freshly arranged intellectually and physically, the SRVHS photographic glass plate collection is ready to be digitized.

The Archival Field Fellowship is a grant offered by the Roving Archivist Program. The Fellowships increase hands-on assistance to Massachusetts repositories and provide emerging archivists with professional experience and mentorship. In 2023-2024, three institutions representing a diverse cross-section of archival repositories are hosting field fellows. As the fellowships are completed, field fellows share reflections and insights about their site experience on the MA SHRAB blog.  This program is funded through support from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission.