Finding Aids

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.

The Hiebler family papers include documents pertaining to four generations. The bulk of the collection consists of letters written by Alfred I. du Pont to his grandsons Bayard Hiebler and Benno Hiebler, dated 1927 to 1935.

Porta L. Young (1920-2015) was part owner of a mom-and-pop family furniture store, Kepner & Romich Furniture Store, in Pottstown, Pennsylvania. The album was prepared by Young to document her family's activities between June 6, 1964 and April 2, 1965. Like a scrapbook, it contains a wide assortment of objects and ephemeral literature, including Christmas, birthday and valentine cards, snapshots, tourist literature and souvenirs, picture postcards, guide maps, programs, tickets, newspaper clippings, and pin-back buttons issued to visitors and in the 1964 presidential race, down to placemats, decorative sugar packets, cardboard badges and a dried magnolia leaf from Mount Vernon. Unlike many family scrapbooks, each object or group of objects is accompanied by substantial typed text describing the family's experiences and reactions.