African Americana

Leather album, 5 1/2 x 7 1/4 x 2 1/4 in. (surface wear including cracking to spine, though all pages remain attached). Contains 85 CDVs and 5 tintypes, many with Oberlin imprints, including portraits of Oberlin professors Dr. James Dascomb (signed) and his wife Marianne Parker Dascomb, C.H. Churchill (signed), Henry E. Peck (signed), Charles Grandison Finney, and M.W. Fairfield (signed) and his wife E.F. Fairfield (signed); and Oberlin President James Harris Fairchild. Other images unidentified, likely family portraiture.

[With:] 2 1/8 x 3 5/8 in. CDV on cardstock mount (toning, minor spotting, discoloration and wear to mount edges and corners). Mt. Vernon, OH: Maxwell's Photograph Rooms, 1867. Imprint on verso, along with pencil inscriptions identifying some subjects as "Laura," "Anna," "Rose," and "Letitia," and date as "May 24th 1867." Five females, presumably Oberlin students, are posed together.

Oberlin College was the first college in the United States to admit black students beginning in 1835, and women beginning in 1837. It quickly gained a reputation as a center for abolitionist activities and was a key stop along the Underground Railroad. The school's involvement in the 1858 Oberlin-Wellington rescue of a fugitive slave and subsequent trial of two students under the Fugitive Slave Act garnered national attention.