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The collection includes 3,100 black and white and colored slides of Michigan railroad companies, vehicles, tracks, wrecks, depots, workers, and Michigan towns.

The slide collection includes approximately 3,100 mostly black and white, but with some colored 35 mm slides of Michigan railroad companies, their cars, engines, tracks, wrecks, depots, workers; Michigan towns on railroad lines, and the people, organizations, events, and buildings in them; logging camps, their crews, trains, kitchens, big wheels, and river jams; ships and boats; special trains and train cars; and miscellaneous. Towns well documented in the collection include: Charlevoix, Deward, Ellsworth, Flint, Gaylord, Honor, Midland, Petoskey, and Traverse City, Michigan. Lumber companies well documented in the collection include: Stephan’s Lumber Company, Waters, Michigan, and Yuill Bros. Lumber Company, Vanderbilt (Mich.). Two negatives of an unidentified railroad depot and an inventory to the slides completes the collection.

Michigan is abbreviated “Mich.” in the box and folder listing.

Homemade glass slides (39) document historic buildings, fort, rock formations, and harbors of Mackinac Island (Mich.), Arlington Hotel, Petoskey (Mich.), Pointe Aux Barques lighthouse, Chicago (Ill.), including one of a statue of Abraham Lincoln by August Saint-Gaudens in Lincoln Park, and buildings and statues of the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition (2) seen in 1898-1899, and miscellaneous slides of other locations.

The collection consists of 39 homemade slides documenting Lamont, Mackinaw Island, and Petoskey, Michigan; Pointe Aux Barques Lighthouse in Port Hope, Michigan; Chicago, including buildings of the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 seen in 1898 and 1899; two ships, the launch of the Illinois, April 22, 1899, and the U.S.S. Oregon, returning from the Philippines, 1898; and an interior view of a home in Denver, Colorado; the exterior of Hadden Hall in Debyshire, England; a view of a dock, possibly in Milwaukee, Wisconsin; and a few unidentified, miscellaneous slides. Many of the homemade slides have manufactured labels on which are typed “No.,” “Subject,” and “Manufactured by Geo. H. Luther, Austin, Ill.” Some of the slide labels are just slips of paper. The information on the slide labels is handwritten unless otherwise specified in the inventory as being typed. While most of the slides are undated they are clearly a set, so they were likely all made between 1898 and 1899. The slides were not originally numbered, but are now (if they have a label) to facilitate retrieval and use by researchers. The collection probably was in part created and in part collected by George H. Luther. Overall the slides are in good condition and are housed in their original box.

The collection consists of various photographic materials documenting a variety of Michigan locations, buildings, topics, and people.

The collection consists mostly of glass-plate and black and white film negatives of varying sizes, as well as some matching or related black and white photographs of varying size. There are also slides (4) and color photographs (9). The collection is organized into film negatives, glass-plate negatives, and negatives of Will B. Gregg. Each subseries is then organized alphabetically by topic. Most of the collection is undated, but some are dated 1904-1905, [1920s], 1927-1928, and 1972.

Major topics documented in the collection include the vacation resort communities on Sager’s Resort on Burt Lake; Bryant’s Hotel on Douglas Lake; Torch Lake Camp or Hayo-Went-Ha YMCA camp for boys, 1927-1928; and boat racing in Oden, Michigan [1920s]. Also included are the buildings, nature, people and animals of Boyne City, Charlevoix, Horton Bay, Pickerel Lake, Rosedale, Petoskey, Walloon Lake, as well as tourist sites on Mackinac Island. While a number of prominent people’s homes in Rosedale and Ellis Real Estate advertisements in Rosedale, and cottages at Pickerel Lake are identified, the majority of buildings and people in the collection are not.

People were photographed in both individual portraits and groups, doing a variety of functions including: enjoying picnics, social gatherings, fishing, hunting, driving horse-drawn buggies, sleds, and wagons, playing with pets, having fun, boating, racing boats, and posing with their families. They are also shown working on farms and in the logging business. Other topics documented include various boats, a town, possibly Onaway, a church, numerous houses, a boat livery station, vacation cottages, and some downtown stores, farms, fields, clouds, nature scenes of lakes, rivers, lakeshores, docks, forests, bridges, and piles of lumber. Horses appear in many of the images, as do dogs and cows, but dogs are also featured alone in two portraits.

The Logging, (7), People (7), and Walloon Lake, Michigan (6) Glass-plate Negatives which each measure 6.5x8.5 inches, undated, almost all have two images per plate. Otherwise each negative in the collections is of a single image.

There are also color photographs (9) and slides (4), 1972, generally related to Ernest Hemingway’s life in Horton Bay including images of buildings, a historic plaque, and some photographs of Ernest Hemingway’s family in 1915 photographed from books on Hemingway. For information on Ernest Hemingway see the finding aid for his collection.

The last box includes one folder of prints of images scanned from damaged glass-plate negatives, cellulose nitrate negatives, and a badly crinkled film. The best scan possible was made. The CD has been included with the prints.

Processing Note: Obvious duplicate images were withdrawn from the collection. A number of plates with what appeared to be dried muck and/or mold, plates with severe emulsion damage, and four neon yellow glass-plate negatives, as well as nitrate film negatives and positives on transparent film were scanned and the originals removed from the collection. The scans were added to the collection in order to protect the health of researchers and the chemical stability of the collection.