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Robbins-Mills Collection of Herbert Wendell Gleason Photographic Negatives, 1899-1937 Concord Free Public Library — Special Collections |
SCOPE AND CONTENT
Herbert Wendell Gleason was a major American landscape photographer of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. From 1899 to1937, he took thousands of photographs from Maine to Alaska, covering a remarkable range of subjects including the private homes and gardens of New England and Long Island, NY to Luther Burbank's horticultural experiments. Gleason's earliest photographs were of Minnesota, where he spent sixteen years.
Beginning in 1899, Gleason embarked on a forty-year project to photograph Concord, MA, which resulted in the most comprehensive and permanent visual record of the landscape and plants that Thoreau had written about in his journals.
Gleason's extensive documentary photographs of our national parks, taken from 1905 to 1926, form another significant body of work in the collection. Wherever he traveled, Gleason took photographs of flowers, plants, and trees, and botanical images figure prominently in many of the series. Photographs of prominent individuals (including Luther Burbank, Stephen T. Mather, Frederick Olmsted II, and Bradford Torrey), family members, as well as of Gleason himself, are scattered throughout the collection.