Finding Aids

The National Railroad Passenger Corporation, Amtrak, is a passenger rail service in the United States. This item is a standard twelve-month calendar, with an image on the top portion of each month featuring an Amtrak train.

Crawford H. Greenewalt (1902-1993) was an executive with the DuPont Company and president of the firm from 1948 to 1962. He had a passion for the natural sciences, and combined his love of ornithology with photography. He was especially known for his high-speed photographs of hummingbirds. His ornithological interests included bird songs, the radiance of hummingbird feathers, and the evolution of shapes and sizes of birds in relation to their flight abilities. Greenewalt's personal papers are primarily focused on his retirement years and his avocational interests. The papers document Greenewalt's political activities in the Republican National Committee and include exchanges with many of the leading political and business figures of the day. Of particular significance are the papers describing Greenewalt's work in photography and ornithology, beginning in 1948. These materials trace his research interests in the hummingbird and bird flight and his trips to places like Brazil, Peru, Venezuela, the Antilles, New Guinea, and the Galapagos Islands in order to observe and photograph birds in their natural habitats. Other files describe Greenewalt's work on the visiting committee at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1965-1987), which evaluated the school's academic programs.

E.I. du Pont de Nemours & Company is a chemical company more commonly referred to as the DuPont Company. The Photo Products Department was formed in December 1941. The products it manufactured expanded from cinema film and included an array of medical products related to x-ray film and other photographic film products. This is a small collection of DuPont Company Photo Products Department materials primarily related to x-ray and radiographic film processing.

Based in Wilmington, Delaware, Frank Earle Schoonover (1877-1972) was a prolific commercial illustrator, artist, and avid photographer. Over the course of a six-decade career, he completed more than twenty-five hundred works, primarily illustrations for magazines and books but also landscapes, portraits, murals, book plates, sculpture, and stained-glass windows. This collection consists of negatives taken by Schoonover, largely for use as source material for his artwork. There are also images of his artwork, restoration projects, and him, his family, and friends.

Francis “Frank” Pierre Gentieu (1876-1950) was a ballistic engineer at E.I. du Pont de Nemours & Company, a chemical company more commonly referred to as the DuPont company. Gentieu worked at DuPont's Carney's Point Plant in New Jersey from 1901 to 1941. This small collection contains an account by Gentieu entitled "The First Fifty Years at Carney's Point" (1891-1941); correspondence with du Pont family members; a list of his father Pierre Gentieu's photographs of the DuPont Company and Brandywine area; and a recollection written by Samuel Brown of a conversation with Sophie M. du Pont (1810-1888) related to the Brandywine Manufacturers Sunday School.

James Henry Yeager (1911-1986) was the industrial photographer for the Bethlehem Steel Corporation for thirty years, between 1946 and 1976. The first half of this collection contains photographs taken by James H. Yeager during his tenure at Bethlehem Steel as industrial photographer. The second half the this collection consists of photos and slides taken by Yeager while traveling in Pennsylvania, New York, and New England, and to a lesser degree Washington, DC and the southern United States.

This collection consists of glass plate negatives showing scenes from Carbon County, Pennsylvania during the second half of the nineteenth century, as well as a selection of archival prints. The majority of the images show scenes from Mauch Chunk (now Jim Thorpe) and the surrounding area, the Mauch Chunk Switchback Railway, and the waterfalls at Glen Onoko.

James "Jim" Joseph Dallas, Sr. (1932-2019) was a photographer employed by the DuPont Company, a chemical company. He worked at DuPont for ten years before opening his own industrial and commercial photography business, Dallas Studios based in Wilmington, Delaware. In 1968, Dallas also worked as a freelance commercial and industrial photographer. Companies such as the Speakman Company, Strescon Industries, Cytometrics Incorporated, and ICI America Incorporated are just a few of the industries he worked for. This collection consists of images from Jim Dallas’ assignments primarily for the DuPont Company. The collection of negatives and photographic prints are arranged into five different sereis: I. Sites, II. Products, III. Advertisements and publications, IV. Events and meetings, and V. People.

The Lehigh Valley Railroad was a railroad company in the northeastern United States primarily used to haul anthracite coal from Mauch Chunk (now Jim Thorpe), Pennsylvania, to Easton, Pennsylvania. This collection consists of twenty-two glass negatives and one box. Most photographs depict the rolling stock of Lehigh Valley Railroad dating to approximately some point between 1934 and 1948, based on engine numbers.

Lepley & Joswick Photographers was a commercial photographic studio in Chicago, Illinois, between 1946 and 1952. The firm was a partnership between Alden D. Lepley (1911-2003) and Gerald "Jerry" J. Joswick (1923-1990). In 1946, Lepley and Joswick opened a photography studio at 5121 W. Devon Ave. in Chicago. Their clients were mainly industrial ones. Both partners continued to pursue side projects and give lectures separately. This small collection of photographs features a range of commercial images depicting different areas of industry in Chicago between 1940 and 1952. It includes food factory assembly line workers, canned and boxed food products, home appliances and electronics, and interior home designs.

This collection consists of glass plate negatives and photographic copy prints which were made directly from the negatives. The images document an array of subjects, though the majority of the images are of locomotives, railroad cars, railroad stations, and other railroad infrastructure. Various landscape and cityscape photographs are also included. Where it is possible to identify the locations, the majority of images document sites in Pennsylvania, though photographs of sites in New York state and Ontario are also present.

The Chisholm Bros. was a publishing company that produced railway, travel and tourists guides, and souvier albums which depicted routes of travel. This item is a hard cover souvenir with eighteen views of sights in Mauch Chunk, the "Switzerland of America." Images are on 12 unpaginated folded panels.

The Midvale Steel Company manufactured steel parts for the railroad industry and the armaments industry. The company was known for casting, forging, and machining high-quality steels, including alloy steels. This album contains photographs showing exteriors and interiors of Midvale Steel facilities in the Nicetown area of Germantown.

Paul J. Ganahl (1916-2002) was an electrical engineer who served in the United States Air Force. This item is a manuscript diary kept by Ganahal between January 2, 1953, and December 31, 1953, while working as an electrical engineer performing aerial photography tests for the United States Air Force in California and New Mexico. The daily entries are bullet lists of film rolls develped, problems found, people met with or spoken to, flight test details, and places traveled. The diary provides technical information about the develpment of reconnaissance photography, engineering challenges, and project team communication.

Pierre Gentieu (1842-1930) was an artist, photographer, and an employee of the DuPont Company for thirty-four years. Pierre Gentieu and his wife, Sarah Albina "Binie" Gentieu (1846-1925) had six children. Although three children had no issue, they had nine grandchildren and twenty great grandchildren. All six children worked for the DuPont Co. and several grandchildren did as well. This collection consists of nine albums that document the Gentieu family history, primarily the life of the patriarch of the family Pierre Gentieu (1842-1930). The albums contain originals and reproductions of correspondence, family trees, documents, photographs, and ephemera.

Robert B. Watson (1931-) was a mechanical engineer who worked on the development of high-speed trains between 1966 and 1998. This collection consists of photographs related to railroads in Pennsylvania and New York, dating from the late nineteenth century through the mid-twentieth century.

William H. Rau (1855-1920) was prominent Philadelphia photographer. During the 1870s and 1880s, William H. Rau would become best known for his work photographing scenic views from around the world. In 1895, Rau received a commission from the Lehigh Valley Railroad. Once again traveling in a customized passenger car, Rau traveled on the Lehigh Valley Railroad’s lines from New York City to the Lehigh Valley in Pennsylvania and upstate New York, documenting hundreds of landscapes along the way. Over two hundred images from this appointment would later be placed in Lehigh Valley Railroad terminals and public sites along the railroad’s reach.