One of Hagley Library's newest additions to its Digital Archives is the World’s Columbian Exposition, Pennsylvania Railroad (PRR) exhibit photographs (Accession 2022.226), a collection of 60 photographs showing sights from along the rail lines of the Pennsylvania Railroad. Before it could grace your computer screens, however, the collection had to be processed.
At Hagley, collections like this are typically processed by a different archivist before reaching my digitization lab, but this collection was special. While it's usually smarter to process prior to digitization, exceptions are often made for collections consisting of lantern slides, glass negatives, film transparencies, and other works that are hard to view in their current physical form.
In 2019, I processed and digitized just such a collection; the William H. Rau lantern slides (Accession 1971.360) collection. William H. Rau (1855-1920) was prominent Philadelphia photographer known for photographing and publishing scenic views from around the world and was commissioned by both the Lehigh Valley Railroad and the Pennsylvania Railroad. You can read more about Rau and the William H. Rau lantern slides collection by clicking here. Since that time, other lantern slide collections containing, or suspected to contain, work by Rau have passed through my digitization lab (you can learn more about one of them here).
When Hagley acquired this new collection, we knew relatively little about it other than it was associated with the Pennsylvania Railroad Company's exhibit at the World's Columbian Exposition. The Pennsylvania Railroad Company's pavilion at the Exposition displayed many of the photographs taken by Rau during his first commission with the railroad. Our task then was to identify the photographs we had acquired and to discover if any of them could be attributed to Rau. Based on my previous work with Rau's photography, our usual workflow shifted, and processing and digitization became a one-person job.
Fortunately, many of the photographs contained at least some partially identifying information. The reverse of this image of the Ohio Steel Company, seen at right, for example, identified the company, the city, and included the text 'Penna lines - Northwest Sys' and 'P148-2895'. This gave me somewhere to start my investigation.
It didn't take very long before this information led me to the Catalogue of the Exhibit of the Pennsylvania Railroad Company at the World's Columbian Exposition, Chicago, 1893, where on page 148, catalog item 2895 was identified as 'Ohio Steel Company, Cleveland, Ohio' in the 'Industries Along Lines of the Northwest System' section of the exhibition. Cross-referencing available information provided by the photographs with this resource allowed for the conclusive identification of most of the photographs, with only a few attached to likely, but not definitively certain, exhibit numbers.
Unfortunately, the compilers of the exhibit catalogue had not seen fit to include photographer attributions. While we had identified the subjects of the photographs and how they fit into the original exhibition, we still didn't know who to attribute the works to. It was time to do some further research.
According to the Library's copy of Traveling the Pennsylvania Railroad: Photographs of William H. Rau, 92 of the 312 photographs found in the Catalogue of the Exhibit of the Pennsylvania Railroad Company at the World's Columbian Exposition, Chicago, 1893, are identified as having been "photographed 1892". These are unusual; no other photographs are identified this way, and no other phrasing or dates are used.
The titles bearing this detail also match photographs known through other sources to have been taken by Rau, and these catalogue items are generally accepted to be attributed to Rau's June to September 1891 commission with the railroad (his second, which ran from April to July 1893, would have occurred too late for inclusion in the Exposition).
While none of the catalogue items matching our photographs bore this detail, Traveling the Pennsylvania Railroad: Photographs of William H. Rau also noted that it was still possible that some of the remaining 220 photographs were taken by Rau. My work wasn't done; it was time to go make some friends at other archival institutions.
According to Traveling the Pennsylvania Railroad, following the Columbian Exposition, the original copies of exhibits of the Pennsylvania Railroad made their way through a few archival institutions before landing safely in Altoona's branch of the Southern Alleghenies Museum of Art. William H. Rau's own albums of photographs, meanwhile, currently reside at the Altoona Area Public Library, the J. Paul Getty Museum, and the Library Company of Philadelphia.
Distant institutions were kind enough to provide relevant collection inventories, while a visit to the nearby Library Company of Philadelphia provided both a fun excursion and a opportunity to look through their collections related to Rau, including Railroad Photography, his own catalog listing 312 photographs he took for the 1891 commission with the Pennsylvania Railroad.
With these resources in hand and my options seemingly exhausted, a conclusion was reached .... [insert drumroll] .... there is no apparent available evidence that any of these 60 images in our collection can be definitively attributed to Rau, and we have yet to identify any known photographers using other means [insert sad trombone]. But all is not lost! The many twists and turns this research project took did yield other useful information about our newly processed and digitized collection.
While the identities of our photographer or photographers remain a mystery, these images are a unique addition to a crowded digital landscape; searches for matching images online in other institutions and private collections came up empty. Given the volume of material in our collections and the limited time and staff available to scan it all, being able to digitize material that has not already been published online is always a priority.
We were also able to learn quite a bit more about the context of these photographs and their place in the Pennsylvania Railroad's exhibition. The World's Fair was held in Chicago from May 5 to October 31, 1893 and covered 690 acres, and featured cultural, industrial, horticultural, architectural, and scientific exhibitions from across the United States as well as forty-five other nations.
The Pennsylvania Railroad Company's exhibit at the World's Columbian Exposition was housed in a dedicated pavilion located near the fairground's 64th Street entrance, immediately northeast of the fairground's station for passengers arriving by rail. Red arrows have been added to this bird's-eye view map and indexed map to show the location of the Pennsylvania Railroad's Pavilion.
The exhibition housed within the pavilion building and on the surrounding grounds, shown at right, offered visitors access to physical artifacts, historic rolling stock, model stations and equipment, maps, memorabilia, and, of course, photographic views related to the company's history and services.
The images in our collection were once exhibited alongside similar photographs throughout the eastern half of the exhibition pavilion, circled in red below. These photographs document industries located along Pennsylvania Railroad and subsidiary rail lines as well as views of wharves, docks, and stations used by the railroad. The catalogue was also used as a reference for organizing the collection into series that correspond to divisions used in the catalog.
And there is one last thing we know for certain ... while one of the most fun things about digitizing and processing materials at Hagley Library is getting to research and learn about a wide variety of collections broadly related to business and technology across centuries, we're also lucky to work with researchers and scholars who frequently reach out to us when their work can help add details to our Digital Archives collections. If you recognize any of the photographers in this digital collection, let us know!
Skylar Harris is the Metadata and Digitization Coordinator at Hagley Museum and Library