Thomas Layton Photograph Collection

Thomas Layton Photograph Collection

Layton, Thomas

Williamsburg (Va.) - Photographs

Williamsburg (Va.) - Buildings, structures, etc.

A series of eight hundred progress photographs taken by Thomas Layton, a contract photographer for the Williamsburg Restoration between 1928-1930, to document the first phase of work. Layton operated a photo studio at 507 E. Broad Street in Richmond, Virginia. The Williamsburg office of architects Perry, Shaw & Hepburn hired him in 1928 to take record photographs at different sites and to make copy photographs from historical publications and nineteenth-century images that would aid their research. The subject matter of the collection focuses upon restoration or reconstruction work taking place in Blocks 13, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20 and 21, with the greatest number focusing upon the architectural investigations and preservation work at the Wren Building, College of William & Mary. A smaller segment of the collection encompasses general Williamsburg scenes and structures in the mid-Atlantic region studied by the team as architectural precedents for the work being undertaken in Williamsburg.

Colonial Williamsburg's Audiovisual Department produced master file prints from all of the negatives in the Layton Collection in the 1950s. By the early 1960s, a group of over three hundred nitrate negatives began showing signs of deterioration and were disposed of.

Layton, Thomas

800 photographs

Special Collections, John D. Rockefeller Jr. Library, The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation