Pictorial Archives of Early American Architecture
Photographs of American architecture
Collection digitized? No.
The Pictorial Archives of Early American Architecture (PAEAA)
was the first photographic collection for the study of American
architecture assembled at the Library of Congress. Initiated
by a grant from the Carnegie Corporation in 1930, the PAEAA
instituted a national campaign to acquire photographic negatives
of seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and nineteenth-century buildings
in the United States. During its most active period, 1930 to
1938, the PAEAA collected and cataloged approximately ten thousand
negatives and
photoprints, including series by John Mead Howells, Frances
Benjamin Johnston,
Delos Smith, Thomas T. Waterman, and Francis M. Wigmore.
The architecture of Connecticut, Delaware, the District of
Columbia, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey,
New York, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, and Virginia is particularly
well represented. The photographers predominantly documented
houses, ranging from cabins to mansions, but they included
a fair number of churches, courthouses and educational buildings,
as well as a smaller number of bridges and street scenes.
Like the Historic American Buildings
Survey , which was established a few years later, the
collection is organized by state, county, and city. Items
are represented in the PAEAA card index and the master card
catalog for
the architectural collections.
Note: Information for this entry was compiled
in the late 1970's for inclusion in: Special Collections
in the Library of Congress: A Selective Guide. Compiled
by Annette Melville. Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 1980.
The entry was revised in 2000. |