E.L. Owens Photograph Album

E.L. Owens Photograph Album

Historic buildings - Virginia - Williamsburg

Historic buildings - Virginia - Yorktown

Historic buildings - Virginia - Jamestown

Monuments & memorials - Virginia

Architecture, Domestic - Virginia - Williamsburg

Williamsburg (Va.) - Photographs

Public buildings - Virginia - Williamsburg

Architecture, Colonial - Virginia - Williamsburg

Photograph album compiled by E.L. Owens in 1911 which encompasses images of street scenes, historic sites, monuments, and memorials that drew visitors to the Historic Triangle of Williamsburg, Jamestown, and Yorktown in early twentieth-century Virginia. It is an example of a travel album documenting the beginnings of the region's role as a tourist destination.

The period from the 1890s-1930s witnessed a rise in the production of many such personal mementoes. The Rockefeller Library holds a number of examples ranging from anonymous albums of pre-restoration photos, to scrapbooks compiled by families who lived in Williamsburg’s historic homes, to those documenting the early impressions of tourists between the 1930s-1950s.

Scrapbooks first became popular in the Victorian era as a place to collect and preserve cards, magazine articles, labels, autographs, and colorful prints. After the introduction of the Brownie camera in 1900, the photographic medium became more affordable for the average American and allowed photographs to act as a personal diary of activities. Around this same time, Williamsburg’s residents began working through organizations such as the APVA to rally efforts to preserve some of the town’s eighteenth-century structures and associated history.

Turn-of-the-century albums in the collection such as this one reveal local resident’s experimentation with photos and notations to record their responses to Williamsburg’s historic past.

Owens, E.L.

1911