DC -- GWU -- Museum and Textile Museum -- Exhibit: Treasures from the Albert H. Small Collection:
Bruce Guthrie Photos Home Page: [Click here] to go to Bruce Guthrie Photos home page.
Recognize anyone? If you recognize specific folks (or other stuff) and I haven't labeled them, please identify them for the world. Click the little pencil icon underneath the file name (just above the picture). Spammers need not apply.
Slide Show: Want to see the pictures as a slide show?
[Slideshow]
Copyrights: All pictures were taken by amateur photographer Bruce Guthrie (me!) who retains copyright on them. Free for non-commercial use with attribution. See the [Creative Commons] definition of what this means. "Photos (c) Bruce Guthrie" is fine for attribution. (Commercial use folks including AI scrapers can of course contact me.) Feel free to use in publications and pages with attribution but you don't have permission to sell the photos themselves. A free copy of any printed publication using any photographs is requested. Descriptive text, if any, is from a mixture of sources, quite frequently from signs at the location or from official web sites; copyrights, if any, are retained by their original owners.
Help? The Medium (Email) links are for screen viewing and emailing. You'll want bigger sizes for printing. [Click here for additional help]
Specific picture descriptions: Photos above with "i" icons next to the bracketed sequence numbers (e.g. "[1] ") are described as follows:
GWMTRE_190614_05.JPG: Relic from Lincoln's Death
A shred of wallpaper taken from Ford's Theater is an example of a "Lincolniana" relic. After President Lincoln's assassination on April 14, 1865, the public yearned for physical items associated with the martyred president. Mourners and souvenir hunters tore pieces of carpet and wallpaper from the presidential box where John Wilkes Booth ambushed the president.
GWMTRE_190614_23.JPG: Here They Hanged
Lewis Paine, David Herold, George Atzerodt, and Mary Surratt, the first woman in America to be hanged, are photographed during their execution. They were all involved in President Lincoln's assassination. The image shows the four conspirators on the scaffolding in the yard of the Washington Arsenal Penitentiary (now Fort McNair). A private audience of invited guests stands on the lower left.
Photograph by Alexander Gardner, 1865
GWMTRE_190614_28.JPG: $100,000 Reward!
Six days after President Abraham Lincoln's assassination, the U.S. War Department printed this broadside. It offers rewards for John Wilkes Booth and also John H. Surratt and David C. Herold, whose names are misspelled beneath their photos. Real photographs were rarely used on posters because of limitations in printing technology, and their use here highlights the severity of the crime and the importance of the reward.
GWMTRE_190614_36.JPG: The "Gettysburg Portrait"
Alexander Gardner captured this photo of President Lincoln four months after the Union victory at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, during the Civil War. Lincoln visited Gardner's studio, located at 7th and D Streets, NW, eleven days before delivering the Gettysburg Address. During another photoshoot on the same day, Gardner also photographed Lincoln and his secretaries John Hay and John Nicolay together, showing the strength of the Union government.
GWMTRE_190614_42.JPG: Camp Fry, Washington, D.C.
Camp Fry, used mostly for the collection and distribution of Union supplies to soldiers in and around the capital during the Civil War, covered part of the current campus of the George Washington University. This view of the camp looks south from Washington Circle at the intersection of 23rd Street and Pennsylvania Avenue, NW. The yellow, horse-drawn vehicle on the left side of the circle is an early streetcar.
GWMTRE_190614_47.JPG: The Destruction of the Union Supply Trains at Manassas Junction by Jackson and Stuart's Cavalry, CSA, August 28, 1862
Private Robert Knox Sneeden recorded the destruction of the Union supply trains at Manassas Junction two days before the Second Battle of Bull Run in July 1862. After the Civil War, Sneeden published a memoir and colored many other sketches. This is the only known Sneeden watercolor outside the collection at the Virginia Historical Society. Mr. Small acquired it at auction after it caught his eye on the popular show Antiques Roadshow.
GWMTRE_190614_54.JPG: Letter from Thomas Jefferson, Secretary of State, to Major Peter L'Enfant
The Residence Act of 1790 set in motion the events which led to the creation of the District of Columbia as the seat of the federal government. This letter from then-Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson orders city planner Peter Charles L'Enfant to travel to Georgetown on the Potomac to begin sketching the new federal city.
GWMTRE_190614_59.JPG: Lottery Tickets
Superintendent of the Federal City and land speculator Samuel Blodget, Jr., organized two lotteries to help finance the building of early Washington. The ten tickets on this sheet were each signed by Blodget, but were never separated and sold. The lotteries failed to raise the amounts needed.
GWMTRE_190614_64.JPG: George Washington's Houses: Floor Plan and Correspondence (1798)
George Washington hired the architect of the Capitol, William Thornton, to supervise the construction of two houses for "the accommodation of Congress" on lots Washington purchased on Capitol Hill. Somewhat of an architect himself, Washington drew this floor plan for the houses. The letter from Thornton conveys the architect's design advice. The letter is framed with the address side showing. Thornton's comments are a reproduction.
GWMTRE_190614_73.JPG: Meet the Collector
GWMTRE_190614_78.JPG: Treasures from the Albert H. Small Collection
Albert H. Small began collecting in 1949. On a trip to New York City, he wandered into an antiquarian bookshop and unearthed this first Washingtoniana treasure: a manuscript notebook chronicling the boundary stones that define the District of Columbia. His interest in his hometown soon grew into a desire to collect, preserve, and share D.C. history, especially with young people.
By 2018, Mr. Small had assembled more than 1,300 objects of prized Washingtoniana that illuminate both the city's local story and its history as the nation's capital. This exhibition samples several well represented areas of Mr. Small's collection: maps, the founding of Washington, D.C., the Civil War and President Lincoln in the city, and unique tourist memorabilia.
"The history that you get from these things is very valuable. It is part of our heritage. If young people don't take an interest in these things, who is going to? If we don't have young people who care about these things, our cultural heritage is lost."
-- Albert H. Small, Interview with GW students, 2015
Description of Subject Matter: Treasures from the Albert H. Small Collection
Ongoing
A selection of maps, letters, prints, and artifacts on display from the museum’s Albert H. Small Washingtoniana Collection includes recent acquisitions and rare treasures.
Mr. Small, a third-generation Washingtonian, first became interested in historical collecting after serving in the Navy during World War II. In 2011, Mr. Small donated his unrivaled Washingtoniana collection—nearly sixty years in the making—to GW. The collection documents the formation, development and history of Washington from the eighteenth to the mid-twentieth century.
Bigger photos? To save server space, the full-sized versions of these images have either not been loaded to the server or have been removed from the server. (Only some pages are loaded with full-sized images and those usually get removed after three months.)
I still have them though. If you want me to email them to you, please send an email to guthrie.bruce@gmail.com
and I can email them to you, or, depending on the number of images, just repost the page again will the full-sized images.
Directly Related Pages: Other pages with content (DC -- GWU -- Museum and Textile Museum -- Exhibit: Treasures from the Albert H. Small Collection) directly related to this one:
[Display ALL photos on one page]:
2022_DC_GWU_Museum_Treasure: DC -- GWU -- Museum and Textile Museum -- Exhibit: Treasures from the Albert H. Small Collection (30 photos from 2022)
2020_DC_GWU_Museum_Treasure: DC -- GWU -- Museum and Textile Museum -- Exhibit: Treasures from the Albert H. Small Collection (48 photos from 2020)
2017_DC_GWU_Museum_Treasure: DC -- GWU -- Museum and Textile Museum -- Exhibit: Treasures from the Albert H. Small Collection (46 photos from 2017)
2015_DC_GWU_Museum_Treasure: DC -- GWU -- Museum and Textile Museum -- Exhibit: Treasures from the Albert H. Small Collection (2 photos from 2015)
2019 photos: Equipment this year: I continued to use my Fuji XS-1 cameras but, depending on the event, I also used a Nikon D7000.
Trips this year:
a four-day jaunt to Massachusetts (Boston, Stockbridge, and Springfield) to experience rain in another state,
Asheville, NC to visit Dad and his wife Dixie,
four trips to New York City (including the United Nations, Flushing, and the New York Comic-Con), and
my 14th consecutive San Diego Comic-Con (including sites in Utah).
Number of photos taken this year: about 582,000.
Connection Not Secure messages? Those warnings you get from your browser about this site not having secure connections worry some people. This means this site does not have SSL installed (the link is http:, not https:). That's bad if you're entering credit card numbers, passwords, or other personal information. But this site doesn't collect any personal information so SSL is not necessary. Life's good!
Limiting Text: You can turn off all of this text by clicking this link:
[Thumbnails Only]