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Robbins-Mills Collection of Herbert Wendell Gleason Photographic Negatives, 1899-1937 Concord Free Public Library — Special Collections |
PROVENANCE AND SOURCE OF ACQUISITION
Some time around Gleason's death in 1937, the A.D. Handy Company (a photographic lab in Boston) came into the possession of Gleason's working file of over 7,000 glass plate and film negatives. (The specifics of their acquisition by the Handy Company are still unclear.)
While excavating the Thoreau house site at Walden Pond in 1945, Roland Wells Robbins (archaeologist, historian, Thoreauvian, and resident of Lincoln, MA) brought film to the Handy Company to be processed. In 1948, someone at the company brought the negatives to Robbins' attention. Robbins purchased some of the negatives and was later given the rest of the collection.
In 1954, Robbins offered all of the Concord negatives for sale to the Concord Free Public Library. The Library Trustees agreed to purchase about 700 of them (glass plate and film), leaving Robbins 730 Concord and Thoreau-related negatives and the bulk of the collection including images of other subjects.
In 1979, Roland Robbins sold Gleason's Canadian images to the Glenbow Museum in Calgary, Alberta. In 1980, he sold the remainder of the collection to Nick Mills and Heather Conover. Mills and Conover sold most of the Yosemite negatives to the Yosemite Museum in 1989. In 1997, Mills and Conover contacted the Concord Free Public Library, were made a modest offer for the rest of the collection (over 6,000 negatives), and negotiated a bargain purchase agreement with the Library.