Collections: Photographs

Photographs

Thomas Dwight Biscoe Collection

Thomas Dwight Biscoe (1840-1930) was professor of sciences at Marietta College from 1874 to 1907. He was also an avid photographer, his work being especially valuable for the detailed notes related to the photographic process made for each image. The Biscoe Collection contains about 200 glass plate negatives of Biscoe’s “Allegheny Valley Tour” made through West Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania in 1884. Images of scenery, communities, people, and Civil War battlefields are included. The collection also contains about 50 original prints of Marietta and Marietta College that were made during the late nineteenth century.

Digitized images from the collection

Harry Philip Fischer Collection

Harry Philip Fischer (1879-1949) was born in Marietta and spent his early career working in his father’s shoe store. He opened a photography studio in 1901, and made studio portraits, as well as images of local landscapes and events. The collection is particularly strong in steamboats, river scenes, floods, street scenes, local architecture, schools, businesses, and portraits. It contains about 14,000 glass plates and films of area scenes taken between 1901 and 1949. Digitized images from the collection.

Stephen Durward Hoag Collection

Stephen Durward Hoag (1900-1982), once owner and manager of the Hotel Lafayette in Marietta, Ohio, was an amateur photographer who documented local scenes, people, and events, in images taken between 1945 and 1980. The Hoag Collection includes over 10,000 prints and films, creating a pictorial history of mid-twentieth-century Marietta. It also contains reprints made by Hoag of photographs taken by local photographers in earlier times.

Marietta College Photograph Collection

This collection contains photographs representing Marietta College faculty, students, buildings, activities, and events from the 1850s to the present.

Frederick Way, Jr., Collection

Frederick Way, Jr., (1901- 1992) obtained his pilot’s license in 1923 and spent most of his career on the river. Way wrote a number of books, including Pilotin' Comes Natural, The Log of the Betsy Ann, and The Saga of the Delta Queen, which describe his experiences as a river packet captain. A few years after publishing The Log of the Besty Ann, he started the Steamboat Photo Company. Way was a founding member of the Sons and Daughters of Pioneer Rivermen, and held the honor of guiding the steamboat Delta Queen from San Francisco to Pittsburgh in 1948. The Way Collection contains approximately 9,500 images on 5x7 and postcard-sized negatives of riverboats in film and glass plates. These images formed the basis of Way’s Packet Directory, and represent the work of 15 different photographers.