Monthly Archives: April 2009

Watch for it Wednesday!

mills.jpgNew Collection in OSU Archives’ Flickr Commons: The Harold Frodsham Photographic Collection

We’ve seen the natural beauty of the Pacific NW landscape and the view from loggers in the forests, now we turn our focus inside — to the historic mill pictures in the Harold Frodsham Photographic Collection.

Harold Frodsham was the general manager of the commercial and mercantile departments of the Red River Lumber Company in Westwood, California, from the mid-1920s until 1934, when his position was eliminated. Frodsham, from England, died in Susanville, California in 1958 (he had lived in Westwood and Susanville since the early 1920s).

The Red River Lumber Company was organized in 1883 in Minnesota and began acquiring northeastern California timberland in 1894. The Company began construction of Westwood, its company town in southwestern Lassen County, California, in 1912. The lumber mill at Westwood was essentially completed by 1918 and operated until the mid-1950s.

The Harold Frodsham Photograph Collection consists of 19 images of the interiors and exteriors of lumber mills in Oregon during Frodsham’s tour of mills in Oregon and northern California. The original prints are 3.5 x 5.5 inches and are annotated with detailed descriptions. The collection includes images of the Booth-Kelly Lumber Company (Springfield), Brooks-Scanlon Lumber Company (Bend), Pelican Bay Lumber Company (Klamath Falls), Shevlin-Hixon Company (Bend), and Silverton Lumber Company (Silverton). You’ll also find photographs showing hauling equipment, stackers, and conveyors, as well as one image of the Brooks-Scanlon Lumber Company Camp 1 in central Oregon, where Ponderosa pine is being logged.

What else can you tell us?

To read more about the collection, check out the guide to the Harold Frodsham Photograph Collection.

All of the images are available online in the Oregon Explorer Digital Collection of historic photographs.

We like it local!

corvallis-market.jpgStrawberries, greens, and crunchy carrots? Must mean it’s spring in the Valley! In the Heart of that Valley (Corvallis), we expect the Saturday Farmers’ Market to grace the riverfront– but now the Wednesday Market does as well.

Link to history & archives? Only a tangential one… We are the archives of a university once named “Oregon Agricultural College,” and it’s hard to miss the greenhouses and cattle, but we have a direct link as well: the University Archivist’s wife runs the markets. No market wide discount for us, though there was a buzz in the air yesterday AM and lots of talking about glorious fruits & veggies!

And if you find yourself there on a Wednesday, at the end of the day and hungry for more than a big carrot, check out booths for the Pretzel lady, the potato doughnuts at Gathering Together, Pacific Sourdough pizza, and Zia.

For more juicy details, visit the Locally Grown site.

To learn more about last night’s event, check out the Gazette Times article.

The darker side of Earth Day: Remembering why we remember…

smoke.jpg

How far have we come? We celebrate our Earth today, thinking of ways to reduce, reuse, and recycle to ensure there is an Earth left to celebrate. But, being archivists, we are also mindful that history shows us that sometimes forests burn, houses flood, and pollution ends up in our streams. It’s the nature of having the historical records just outside our office doors…

Be good stewards, take care of our planet, and visit the osu.commons OR 150 collection, which will show you some of the natural beauty our great state has to offer!

Take heart, we have a future: check these sites out:

Beautiful book…

arch-of-planet.jpgOn this Earth Day eve, check out “The dawn of the color photograph: Albert Kahn’s archives of the planet” by David Okuefuna.

From Booklist: “In 1907 the Lumiere brothers, who wowed Paris with its first commercially shown movies in the 1890s, demonstrated the autochrome photographic process, with which color photos could be taken by a glass-plate camera. The banker Albert Kahn embraced it and the next year launched a project that would continue until the Great Depression bankrupted him. Kahn felt that if the world’s people could see one another, animosity based on stereotypes would be dispelled and world peace realized. He dispatched opérateurs, some female, with autochrome plates and movie film to capture how the Other looked and lived for a maximally public archive. It was the dream of, Musée Albert-Kahn’s director Gilles Baud-Berthier says, a man of the nineteenth century, perhaps even the eighteenth—but not the twentieth. So much for outdated idealism. But just look at the pictures, full of the fascination of all old photodocumentation, heightened by color more sensual than later color processes deliver. Accompanied by a nontechnical text and complementing a BBC-TV series, this is a world-history buff’s delight” (Ray Olson).

World Digital Library is live!

wdlhomemap2.jpg“The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and 32 partner institutions today launched the World Digital Library, a website that features unique cultural materials from libraries and archives from around the world. The site―located at www.wdl.org―includes manuscripts, maps, rare books, films, sound recordings, prints and photographs. It provides unrestricted public access, free of charge, to this material.” (LOC)

Why is this so great? To quote indicommons: their mission is to “make available on the Internet, free of charge and in multilingual format, significant primary materials from countries and cultures around the world.”

Is this the beginning of universal access?

Want to know more? Check the Library or Congress press release or the UNESCO press release.

Warm Springs Bead Artist and OSU Alumnus Brigette Whipple to Present at OSU’s Valley Library

beadingJoin Brigette Whipple, an OSU alumnus and renowned beading artist from Warm Springs, will be doing a presentation on her beading craft on Monday, April 20, from 4 to 6 p.m. in the Valley Library’s Willamette Industries seminar rooms. Joining Brigette will be her apprentice, Sharlayne Garcia. The presentation is part of “Oregon Is Indian Country” exhibit current on display during April in the Valley Library. Other components of the exhibit are on display at the Corvallis Benton County Public Library and the Benton County Historical Society in Philomath.

For more information, contact Larry Landis at 737-0540.

Learn more about the Oregon is Indian Country exhibit.

Free up your Friday!

stubborntwig.jpgLauren Kessler, author of an award-winning book on a Japanese-American family, will read from her work at 7:30 p.m. Friday, April 17, in The Valley Library’s rotunda. The winner of an Oregon Book Award and published by the OSU Press, “Stubborn Twig: Three Generations in the Life of a Japanese American Family” was chosen by the Oregon Library Association for its statewide Oregon Reads program to celebrate Oregon’s 150th birthday.

To learn more about the event, read the OSU Media Release or read the Gazette Times article.

More information about “Stubborn Twig” can be found on the OSU Press site.