MOUNT HOLYOKE, DARTMOUTH & SMITH COLLEGE WOMAN’S PHOTO ALBUM — 350+ SNAPSHOTS, NEW ENGLAND COLLEGE LIFE, ROAD TRIPS, YOSEMITE, 1921–1930S
Item #1674
Personal photograph album, 7” x 11”, containing more than 350 original photographs mounted to black paper leaves, with ten Mount Holyoke College postcards. Most photographs are glued to the pages. Three photographs are lacking. Covers heavily worn and detached, with substantial surface loss to front cover; contents generally intact, with expected handling wear, some fading/silvering, and occasional adhesive residue.
A rich and extensively annotated 1920s–1930s women’s college, courtship, travel, and family album, apparently compiled by a young woman associated with Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts, with strong related material from Dartmouth College, Smith College, Amherst, Northampton, Hanover, and surrounding New England towns. More than half the album documents college days and student social life, with manuscript captions in white ink identifying people, places, trips, dances, jokes, and outings.
The Mount Holyoke content includes Paradise Pond, the road to Mount Holyoke College, campus buildings and gardens, Sycamores, college rooms and interiors, the library and chapel, outdoor recreation, hiking, boating, skiing, student groups, art and sculpture on campus, and informal portraits of women students. One page records a “Sophomore Glee Club Dance,” May 8, 1922, while others show weekend visits, picnics, winter scenes, and outings with Smith College friends at Paradise Pond.
A substantial Dartmouth College section appears to center around the compiler’s boyfriend or future husband and includes Dartmouth campus views, Easter vacation at Urban’s in Hanover, hikes on Lyme Road and the Ledyard Trail, Dartmouth Winter Carnival, February 1922, and a large photograph of the “Dartmouth Wheelock Eating Club,” with waiters, dishwashers, orchestra members, and others named in the margins. Captions are often playful and personal: “Sandy washed the dishes!,” “Man Barbed-Wires!,” “Dartmouth Peerade!!,” and “Sandy with senior cane.”
The album also includes a notable early automobile travel sequence “From Northampton, Mass to Hanover, N.H.,” with car and roadside views, including Brattleboro, Vermont, United States Tires advertising, and humorous captions noting roadside delays. Other trips include Ye Candle Glow in Vermont, Woodstock Inn, Dartmouth Promenade, Marine-on-St. Croix, and a later Yosemite/Vernal Falls image dated 1923. Later pages shift toward married life, domestic interiors, gardens, children, horseback riding, sailing, and family travel, with some photographs extending into the 1930s, including sailing images dated 1937.
A lively and substantial album, especially strong for women’s college life, Mount Holyoke, Dartmouth social culture, Smith College connections, early automobile touring, winter sports, student humor, women’s recreation, New England domestic interiors, and post-college family life.
Price: $750.00