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Pioneer in the private camping movement, founder and director of Al-Gon-Quian Boys Camp on Burt Lake in Cheboygan County, Michigan, and officer in the American Camping Association. Correspondence, articles, speeches and photographs; also Camp Al-Gon-Quian materials, including program files, reports, roster files, and published yearly programs; materials of King family, missionaries in China; and plans of Twining home in Ann Arbor, Michigan, originally designed by Albert Kahn and his associate Malcolm for Louis A. Strauss.

The papers of Herbert Twining, except for an earlier family letter from 1888, date from the 1920s to 1980. The collection is broken down into a series of personal and family materials, a series on Camp Al-Gon-Quian, 1931-1967, and photographs.

Photographs by Allen Stross for the Historic American Buildings Survey, Central Michigan Project; include exterior and interior views of buildings in Battle Creek, Brighton, Charlotte, Eaton Rapids, Grand Rapids, Ionia, Kalamazoo, Lansing, Marshall, Mason, Ovid, Vermontville, and Williamston; also data sheets describing the buildings.

This is a collection of photographs taken by Allen Stross for the Historic American Buildings Survey, Central Michigan Project. Included are exterior and interior views of buildings in Battle Creek, Brighton, Charlotte, Eaton Rapids, Grand Rapids, Ionia, Kalamazoo, Lansing, Marshall, Mason, Ovid, Vermontville, and Williamston. Accompanying the photographs are data sheets describing the various buildings. The photographs are arranged by location of building. Each building has a code number which refers to a survey reports. These reports will be found in the last two folders of the collection.

Photographs (positive and negative), slides, and transparencies taken by the company's photographers to document company activities, products, services, employees at work and at leisure, company exhibits and commemorations, and the response of the company to natural disasters and civil disturbances.

In 1993, Michigan Bell as a corporate entity was subsumed within the Ameritech Corporation. As a by-product of this reorganization and the downsizing resulting from it, the company agreed to deposit with the Bentley Historical Library its extensive archive of photographic images. Totalling approximately one million images, the Michigan Bell Telephone Company photo archive consists of negatives, copy prints, and color transparencies taken in the period since World War II (the bulk beginning in 1949). The collection does not include photos taken since 1983; interspersed throughout, however, are numerous images from before 1949.

The collection has been maintained in the order received with two principal series: Positives and Negatives.

The content of the photographs in the two series varies considerably. Naturally the collection documents the products of the company (phones and other communication devices) and the services provided (e.g. employees at work or the company reacting to a specific customer need). These photos were taken both to inform the general public as accompaniment to press notices and advertising copy and as a communications vehicle within the company, informing employees through the company news publication, Tielines, of activities going on in other divisions of the company or among the various regional Bell offices.

More importantly perhaps, the collection has value for its documentation of events and activities that are common to all large companies. These include images relating to: 1. The activities of employees within the corporation at their work (office workers, repairmen, operators, various support personnel, managers, etc.); 2. The activities of employees outside their work routine as members of corporate social groups (i.e., the company baseball or ice hockey team), at home engaged in leisure time activities, or involved in company-sponsored charitable or public service functions; and 3. Commemorations of specific milestones or events (company parade floats, area office open houses, corporate displays at public events such as fairs, etc.).

In addition, the collection documents the extraordinary and unforeseen as the phone company reacts to events and emergencies not within its control (floods, tornadoes, fires, the 1967 Detroit riot, strikes, and the like) or as a participant in history-making events (the announcement in Ann Arbor of the success of the Salk polio vaccine or the preparation involved in the 1980 Republican National Convention that convened in Detroit).