Windmills and schoolhouses and more

It was, of course, inevitable.

The email came in before most folks had even read the blog post yesterday about the marvelous legacy of top-notch photography that Carol McKinney Highsmith is leaving to Americans.¹

“More,” it read, from long-time reader Jeff.“ More, please.”

And we are so very fortunate…

Because there is more.

More resources.

More images we can freely use.

Let’s spend some time this week and poke through just a few of them together, shall we?

Today, for example, we’ll go back to the Library of Congress and visit another collection to see the work of others who have shared their work with us.

Let’s look at the collection with the mouthful title of Historic American Buildings Survey/Historic American Engineering Record/Historic American Landscapes Survey. Here’s how the Library of Congress describes it:

The Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS) and the Historic American Engineering Record (HAER) collections are among the largest and most heavily used in the Prints and Photographs Division of the Library of Congress. Since 2000, documentation from the Historic American Landscapes Survey (HALS) has been added to the holdings. The collections document achievements in architecture, engineering, and landscape design in the United States and its territories through a comprehensive range of building types, engineering technologies, and landscapes, including examples as diverse as the Pueblo of Acoma, houses, windmills, one-room schools, the Golden Gate Bridge, and buildings designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. Administered since 1933 through cooperative agreements with the National Park Service, the Library of Congress, and the private sector, ongoing programs of the National Park Service have recorded America’s built environment in multiformat surveys comprising more than 556,900 measured drawings, large-format photographs, and written histories for more than 38,600 historic structures and sites dating from Pre-Columbian times to the twentieth century. This online presentation of the HABS/HAER/HALS collections includes digitized images of measured drawings, black-and-white photographs, color transparencies, photo captions, written history pages, and supplemental materials. Since the National Park Service’s HABS, HAER and HALS programs create new documentation each year, documentation will continue to be added to the online collections. The first phase of digitization of the Historic American Engineering Record collection was made possible by the generous support of the Shell Oil Company Foundation.²

These images too are, for the most part, free for us to use because they’re in the public domain. The rights statement from the Library of Congress for this collection explains that “The original measured drawings and most of the photographs and data pages … were created for the U.S. Government and are considered to be in the public domain. However, occasionally material from a historical society or other source is included in the photographs or data pages. These materials are noted by the presence of a line crediting the original source, and it may be necessary to receive permission from the owner of such material before it can be published. In all cases the courtesy of an acknowledgment is requested if material is used in a publication.”³

So double check everything you want to use, but oh my… what a lot there is to use…

“Beebe Windmill, Hildreath Lane & Ocean Avenue (moved several times), Bridgehampton, Suffolk County, NY”⁴

“School House, South Pass Avenue near Jefferson Street, South Pass City, Fremont County, WY”⁵

Check it out… some amazing sketches, images and more in this collection too.

SOURCES