Paddle, Portage, Party!: Digitizing Photographs in St. Lawrence University’s Special Collections

During the fall of 2024, two students, Autumn Nealis ’25 and Sophia Roxo ’26, teamed up with Gallery Director Catherine Tedford and Curator of Special Collections Paul Doty to digitize and catalogue a collection of over 130 historical Adirondack photographs by Seneca Ray Stoddard housed at the Owen D. Young Library. Stoddard (1844–1917) was a pioneering landscape photographer known for capturing the rugged beauty of the Adirondack Mountains. Stoddard’s photographs and stereographs in the late 19th century offered viewers, especially those who had never visited the region, a unique glimpse into the untamed wilderness of upstate New York. The project was part of a community-based learning component of Dr. Mindy Pitre’s “Unpacking Museums” course.

This spring, Autumn finished a related project cataloguing a collection of early artotype Adirondack prints by Edward Bierstadt (1824-1906). A lifelong lover of nature, Bierstadt captured the beauty of the mountains, lakes, and rivers, particularly around Blue Mountain Lake and Raquette Lake, when commissioned by William West Durant in 1885 to create a promotional brochure.

Kaya Williams ’27 (shown here in a conservation biology class) also worked at the Gallery this spring as an On-Campus Internship Program (OCIP) intern digitizing a group of black-and-white photos of St. Lawrence University women’s canoe regattas dating to the 1930s. Very little information is known about the regattas, though events held near Commencement started at the boat launch on outer Park Street, and the canoes were most likely the work of J.H. Rushton, a world-renowned Canton-based boatbuilder. One of the photographs in the collection was by D.P. Church, another well-known Canton entrepreneur.

All three digital image collections will be published in JSTOR at https://www.jstor.org/site/stlawu/