Kenneth Spencer Research Library

Spencer Research Library’s Kansas Collection is home to the Shane-Thompson Photograph Collection, which documents a fascinating family of photographers and the images they took of the town and its residents. The studio was successful for seventy-five years, despite a tragic event that should have ended it.

James Boucher Shane. Shane-Thompson Photograph Collection.
Call Number: RH PH 500. Click image to enlarge.

James B. Shane was born in Kentucky in 1840. In the early months of the Civil War he enlisted as a sergeant in the Union 16th Regiment, Kentucky Infantry. Shane served until July 1865 despite suffering serious injuries during the Atlanta Campaign of 1864: his hearing was significantly damaged by his close proximity to cannonade and he lost a leg after a rifle ball shattered his left knee.

After the war, Shane returned to Kentucky, intending to resume his legal studies. Quickly discovering that his severe hearing loss would put him at a serious disadvantage in the courtroom, he had to abandon law as a career. Having read many accounts of westward expansion, Shane left Kentucky and headed to Kansas in 1866. He eventually settled in and around what later became Dickinson County, living there for twelve years and at various times farming, teaching school, working for the railroad as a land agent, and holding various elected positions in local government.

James Shane’s railroad photography car. Shane-Thompson
Photograph Collection. Call Number: RH PH 500.
Click image to enlarge.

In 1878 Shane moved his family to Lawrence, Kansas, to provide his ten children with access to better schools. The following year, Shane spent three weeks with a specialist in Chicago, receiving treatments for his worsening hearing loss. The doctor had several framed photographs of famous men displayed on his office walls, and this gave Shane the idea to have his picture taken. While visiting with the photographer, Shane took an interest in the work of photography and paid the photographer $50.00 for two weeks of lessons. By the end of this time, Shane was hooked. He gave the photographer $200.00 to purchase a photography “outfit” for him and then bought a railroad car for $100.00 to use as his gallery. He returned to Lawrence with a new profession, although unfortunately his hearing was no better.

Train depot in Lawrence, Kansas. Shane-Thompson Photograph Collection.
Call Number: RH PH 500. Click image to enlarge.

Salvation Army group. Shane-Thompson Photograph Collection.
Call Number: RH PH 500. Click image to enlarge.

Shane took his railroad car photo gallery around northeast Kansas and into Iowa. Eventually his wife wanted him stay closer to home, so he parked the car on Massachusetts Street in north Lawrence and bought a house on Louisiana Street. When his business outgrew the railroad car, Shane traded it for a gallery at 829 Massachusetts Street, where Brown’s Shoe Fit is today. It appears that business was quite good because within a few years Shane opened two other galleries in Lawrence, including one at 615 Massachusetts, which currently houses Quinton’s Bar and Deli. Shane also built a little processing shed made of corrugated iron next to the building at 1009 Massachusetts (now Louise’s Bar). He used this shop to re-touch and develop negatives.

Train wreck. Shane-Thompson Photograph Collection.
Call Number: RH PH 500. Click image to enlarge.

Lawrence, Kansas, police officer Sam Jeans.
Shane-Thompson Photograph Collection.
Call Number: RH PH 500. Click image to enlarge.

Shane was working in his processing shed on the morning of February 25, 1902. He was taking a break and standing in the entrance of the shed when two local young men out on their lunch break walked by. They said something to Shane and he believed it to be taunting. He had lately been having quite a bit of trouble with local boys taunting and bullying him. In an attempt that Shane said was meant to scare these two, he raised the revolver he kept in his pants pocket and fired, believing he would shoot over their heads. His arm caught on the bar of the awning that covered the doorway, and the bullet hit Edgar Katherman in the back. The young man fell face forward onto the sidewalk, killed instantly, his hands still in his pockets. It is unknown if Katherman had been one of the boys picking on Shane.

Juno Belle Shane Thompson. Shane-Thompson
Photograph Collection. Call Number: RH PH 500.
Click image to enlarge.

Two weeks after Shane’s arrest, his daughter Juno Belle returned to Lawrence from Virginia to operate the gallery. She was a photographer, too, and a graduate of the Illinois College of Photography. She had been employed in a studio in Virginia that, according to a write-up in the March 8, 1902, Daily World announcing her arrival back in Lawrence, was one of the leading studios in that state.

Herbert Thompson’s senior picture in the
KU Jayhawker yearbook, 1910. University Archives.
Call Number: LD 2697 .J3 1910. Click image to enlarge.

While her father was being held without bail, Juno Belle ran the studio alone. She continued to do so after he was convicted and sent to the Kansas State Penitentiary in Lansing. Herbert Thompson became her business partner after their marriage sometime around 1907, and she taught him all she knew about photography. Together they ran the studio until Herbert’s death in 1929, after which Juno Belle again ran the studio alone until her death in 1953.

In prison, Shane was a model prisoner and put in charge of the photography studio. He was sentenced to hang, but the punishment was never carried out. In late 1912, at the age of nearly 72, his health began to decline. His daughters Myrtle, Vara, Neva, and Ella successfully petitioned the governor for their father’s parole. Shane was eventually pardoned in August 1913. He lived in Abilene with his brother for several months before returning to Lawrence, where he lived in the Savoy Hotel. He died there on December 28, 1913.

Eldridge Hotel, Lawrence, Kansas. Shane-Thompson Photograph Collection.
Call Number: RH PH 500. Click image to enlarge.

Native American family. Shane-Thompson Photograph Collection.
Call Number: RH PH 500. Click image to enlarge.

Considering that Shane, Juno Belle, and Herbert Thompson operated a photography business in Lawrence for seventy-five years, and given the number of photographs and negatives in the current collection, it is believed that the Library does not have all of the photos ever taken by the studio. The collection contains photographs of Lawrence businesses, schools, events, activities, portraits and groups made by Capt. Shane, but the bulk of the collection consists of portrait photography by Juno Belle and Herbert between 1903 and 1923.

Kathy Lafferty
Public Services

The success of and critical acclaim for the recent film 12 Years a Slave has generated an increased public discourse about the history, significance, and lasting implications of slavery in the United States. Beyond Spencer’s African American Experience collections, a perhaps surprising number of sources in both the Kansas Collection and Special Collections highlight various components of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century slavery from multiple points of view.

“I have seen mothers kissing for the last time the faces of their dead offspring,”
wrote Solomon Northup in Twelve Years a Slave, “I have seen them looking down
into the grave, as the earth fell with a dull sound upon their coffins,
hiding them from their eyes forever; but never have I seen
such an exhibition of intense, unmeasured, and unbounded grief, as when Eliza was parted
from her child.” Call Number: Howey B1584. Click image to enlarge.

When researching the past, it’s important to keep in mind that the written historical record – including published and unpublished sources – reflects various contexts within the broader society in which they were originally produced. In Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America, historian Ira Berlin describes the relationship between masters and slaves as “profoundly asymmetrical,” writing that it was constantly being negotiated but “always informed by the master’s near monopoly of force.” However, Berlin also asserts that

Knowing that a person was a slave does not tell everything about him or her. Put another way, slaveholders severely circumscribed the lives of enslaved people, but they never fully defined them. Slaves were neither extensions of their owners’ will nor the products of the market’s demand. The slaves’ history – like all human history – was made not only by what was done to them but also what they did for themselves (2).

Given this context, it’s not surprising that a population of people denied the ability to read and write over the course of generations did not produce voluminous written documentation. However, as Berlin hints at, the written record is not completely bereft of accounts by free and formerly enslaved African Americans, describing their own experiences in their own voices.

Andrew Williams’ narrative is the sole unpublished, handwritten narrative by a formerly enslaved person in Spencer’s collections. Williams (d. 1913) was a slave near Springfield, Missouri, who served in the Civil War and survived Quantrill’s 1863 raid on Lawrence. Williams’ eleven-page narrative begins around the time he acquired his freedom and describes his experiences in the Civil War.

Andrew Williams, along with his mother and siblings,
was freed in September 1862 by the 6th Kansas Regiment,
described on this page of his narrative. During the raid on his owner’s farm,
the soldiers also killed livestock and confiscated guns and food.
Andrew Williams Collection. Call Number: RH MS P42. Click image to enlarge.

More numerous in Spencer’s holdings are published narratives by former slaves, including Olaudah Equiano, Juan Francisco Manzano, Sojourner Truth, Henry Box Brown, John Thompson, Thomas H. Jones, and Jermain Wesley Loguen. Also among Spencer’s holdings is an early printing of Solomon Northup’s narrative, Twelve Years a Slave.

“It was the Sabbath of the Lord…peace and happiness seemed to reign everywhere,
save in the bosoms of Epps and his panting victim and
the silent witnesses around him.” Solomon Northup, Twelve Years a Slave.
Call Number: Howey B1584. Click image to enlarge.

“They embraced me, and with tears flowing down their cheeks,
hung upon my neck,” wrote Solomon Northup at the end of his narrative,
Twelve Years a Slave. “But I draw a veil over a scene
which can better be imagined than described.”
Call Number: Howey B1584. Click image to enlarge.

Supplementing these sources are unpublished documents and published accounts by slaveholders and others who vigorously defended the system and by whites who passionately opposed it. Several of these works are based on the author’s personal observations of the treatment of slaves.

For example, Spencer’s Kansas Collection contains the estate records for Jackson County, Missouri, resident John Bartleson. These documents relate to the Bartleson enslaved African Americans and their legal disposition as property in the settlement of the estate. Additionally, the Kansas Collection also includes bound volumes of records from Natchez, Mississippi, located on bluffs above the Mississippi River about 100 miles upriver from New Orleans. Home to wealthy planters’ city mansions, antebellum Natchez had the most millionaires per capita of any city in the United States. These materials don’t directly address the experiences of enslaved African Americans, whose work created that wealth. However, much can be derived from these meticulous records, which document the management required to operate a sizable plantation and the business transactions of other local enterprises like a medical practice, medical society, and general store.

Pages from “a full inventory” of John Bartleson’s property showing
six slaves listed as part of his personal estate, 1848.
John Bartleson Estate Collection. Call Number: RH MS 867. Click image to enlarge.

Auctioneer’s report from 1853 listing individual and total prices for
Charles, Clara and child, Courtney, Thomas, Fanny, Mary, and William.
It is assumed that they were members of one family separated by this sale
“at the Court House door in the City of Independence [Missouri].”
John Bartleson Estate Collection. Call Number: RH MS 867. Click image to enlarge.

Finally, numerous printed volumes in Spencer’s holdings show slavery was a much-considered topic that was also hotly debated in government and in public. Especially strong are works examining slavery and the slave trade in Great Britain and the British Empire in the late 1700s and early 1800s. Other works, focusing on the United States, show how the dispute over Kansas and the expansion of slavery into new territories was waged in print and how Kansas became a political and physical battleground for pro- and antislavery forces.

Caitlin Donnelly
Head of Public Services

Charles Scott, a prominent attorney in Topeka, Kansas, was born in 1921. He served in the U.S. Army during World War II, and later graduated from Washburn Law School. He joined the law firm established by his father, Elisha Scott, Sr., a well-known trial lawyer in the region. During his early years in practice Charles Scott and his father were successful in securing racial integration of elementary schools in South Park, Johnson County, Kansas. With his brother John H. Scott, he represented plaintiffs in several cases that sought to establish the right of access to swimming pools, theaters, and restaurants in Topeka for African Americans.

In 1954 Charles Scott was one of several attorneys who filed and presented the initial case for the plaintiffs in the landmark Supreme Court case Oliver Brown v. the Board of Education of Topeka. He also appeared as counselor for the plaintiffs before the United States Supreme Court, whose ruling ended segregation in public schools.

The Scott Collection includes personal and professional papers that reflect Mr. Scott’s lifelong pursuit of civil rights issues.

Telegram to Charles Scott from Thurgood Marshall, April 6, 1955. Charles Scott Papers.
Call Number: RH MS 1145, Box 2, Folder 29. Click image to enlarge.

Among Scott’s papers is the above telegram from Thurgood Marshall. Marshall, then serving as Director-Counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, contacted Scott to receive confirmation of a timetable for desegregation of Topeka schools following the 1954 Supreme Court ruling ending school segregation.

This April, the University of Kansas will host a series of events to mark the 60th anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education case.  These will include a KU Libraries exhibition opening (Lasting Impact: Brown vs the Board of Education) on the evening of April 11th and a daylong seminar on April 12th. Both events will consider the legacy of the case and its implications.  For additional information, please see the following news release.

Sheryl Williams
Curator of Collections and Kansas Collection Curator

For my class project in GEOG 658, I attempted to find the backdrop of the 1913 photo of the Quantrill raid survivors using GIS (Geographic Information Systems). The only aspect of the photo that is known is that it was taken in Lawrence. Beyond that, the exact location of this photo is unspecified.

,

Photograph of survivors of Quantrill’s Raid, Lawrence, KS, August 21, 1913.
Call number RH PH 18 L.8.2ff. Kansas Collection, Kenneth Spencer Research Library.
Click image to enlarge and view.

The photo reveals important information about its location. Judging by the position of the people relative to the central building in the backdrop, the photo was taken at an intersection of two roads. The heights of the adjacent buildings are also visible. Identifying the stories of the adjacent buildings and their sequence from the corner building provides an identifiable skyline to locate using other sources, such as the Sanborn Fire Insurance maps and Google Street View. Sanborn Fire Insurance maps show the relation of the buildings to one another and to the city streets, as well as tell the heights of the buildings. A trolley line is also visible to the left of the buildings.

Detail of Eldridge House plan from the Lawrence, KS Sanborn Fire Insurance Map, 1912.
Massachusetts Street is at the top of the image.
Call number RH Map Sanborn, Lawrence 1912, sheet 4. Kansas Collection, Kenneth Spencer Research Library. Click image to enlarge.

I used GIS software to map the 1910 trolley line onto a modern map of downtown Lawrence and to mark the heights of buildings around each intersection. With this information combined into one map, I was able to narrow down the locations for the photograph.

From this investigation, the most likely location for the 1913 photograph is the Southwest corner of Massachusetts and 7th streets, where the Eldridge stands. This location is at an intersection, was historically located along the trolley tracks, and the building heights of the adjacent buildings appear to match the sequence observed in the historic photo. The 1912 Sanborn Fire Insurance map shows several businesses located on the first floor, including an Express Office, Telegraph Office, and Barbershop. A close look at the 1913 photo shows the advertisements for these businesses.

  ,

Details from photograph of survivors of Quantrill’s Raid, Lawrence, KS, August 21, 1913.
Wells Fargo Express Office, Telegraph Office, and Hodges Bros. Hotel Barber Shop.
Call number RH PH 18 L.8.2ff. Kansas Collection, Kenneth Spencer Research Library.

Jennie Ashton
Conservation Student Assistant
Graduate Student, Museum Studies

***Reminder: The Kenneth Spencer Research Library will be closed December 21-December 29, 2013 and January 1, 2014. ***

The 2013 holiday season is underway, and many of us are preparing to send (or have sent) cards to friends and family. With this in mind, we share some cards and postcards of Christmas Past (1900s-1920s).

Christmas Postcards: 1903 – 1907

Left to right:  Postmarked 1903, from Cleveland, Ohio to Leona Baumgartner in Lawrence, Kansas;
Addressed to Leona Baumgartner, undated; Postmarked 1907, from Chicago, IL
to Leona Baumgartner in Lawrence, Kansas.  Anna Olinger Papers. PP 113, Box 1. Click images to enlarge.

These three Christmas postcards were sent to a very young Leona Baumgartner (1902-1991). Baumgartner was a prominent doctor who served as the first female Commissioner of New York City’s Department of Health. This national figure was also a Jayhawk; earning a BA in Bacteriology and MA in Immunology at KU. Explore Leona Baumgartner’s life through several of Spencer’s other collections: the Personal Papers of Leona Baumgartner (PP 52) and J. W. Miller Collection (RH MS 960) and the Kansas Newspaper Clippings Collection (RH MS 828).

Christmas Cards and Postcards: 1913 – 1918

Holiday cards from the Robert L. Gilbert Papers.
Top: Holiday card from “Robert,” undated. Center: “Christmas Greeting” postcard,
postmarked December 22, 1913 and addressed to Mrs. R. L. Gilbert, Lawrence, Kansas.
Bottom left: Card postmarked December 24, 1913, addressed to Mr. & Mrs. R. L. Gilbert,
Lawrence, Kansas, and sent from Meridian, Mississippi. Bottom right: Card postmarked
December 24, 1918, addressed to Mrs. R. L. Gilbert, Lawrence, Kansas. Sent from
Lawrence, Kansas. Robert L. Gilbert Papers. RH MS P764, Folder 1. Click images to enlarge.

Robert L Gilbert (1898 – 1987) was born in Lawrence, KS. He joined the Navy in 1917 and served during World War I as an airplane mechanic, deployed in France.  He returned to Lawrence to attend KU (1919-1923), graduating with a degree in Journalism. The cards pictured above come from his family’s collection (RH MS P764), though the card at the top perhaps bears the signature of the young Robert. Learn more about Robert L Gilbert his Personal Papers, (PP 253), which consist primarily of letters from France but which also include a Christmas Dinner menu from 1918.

Christmas Cards and Postcards: 1917 – 1920

To Miss H. Morrison, Glendive, Montana, sent from New York, New York,
postmarked December 23, 1917 (top), from New York, New York, postmarked
December 24, 1917 (bottom left), and to Harriet in Bloomfield, New Jersey,
sent from New York, New York, postmarked December 22, 1920.
Lionel A. Anderson Collection. RH MS 624, Folder 16.

Harriet M. Kemper Morrison was a nurse at the Northern Pacific Railway Hospital in Glendive, Montana, where she met Dr. Lionel Anderson. The collection consists primarily of letters (1917 – 1920) from Lionel  to Harriet, his fiance; however it also includes holiday cards from a variety of senders. The beige card featuring a candle dates from 1917 and contains the following message:

There are miles and miles
Between us and it is days
And days since we’ve met. But
This little Christmas Greeting
Will prove. I haven’t forgotten you yet.
Signed:  With Best Wishes, Lovingly, Frances

Christmas Cards and Postcards: 1925 – 1927

Cards sent to the Reichert family. Undated card from “Shorty” (top left);
Card from Frankie to Mr. Carroll Reichert, Seneca, Kansas, postmarked
December 21, 1925 and sent from Topeka, Kansas (top right).
Card postmarked December 20, 1927 to Mr. and Mrs. A. L. Riechert, Seneca, Kansas,
and sent from Leavenworth, Kansas (bottom).
Albert. A. Reichert papers. RH MS 1028, Folder 7. Click to enlarge.

Albert A. Reichert lived for many years in Seneca, KS, with his wife Myrtle and son Carroll.  He was a veteran of the Spanish-American War, serving with the 22^nd Kansas Volunteer Infantry Regiment.

Meredith Huff
Building Operations and Stacks Manager, Public Services Student Assistant Co-Supervisor