Browse Items (13 total)

Completed in 1695, Fort Marion (now Castillo de San Marcos) is the oldest surviving masonry fort in the continental U.S. Engineer Ignazio Daza followed standards for building defensive structures that would withstand cannon projectiles and maximize…

Crossing the Selkirk Mountain Range completed the transcontinental Canadian Pacific Railway in 1885, connecting remote British Columbia by land to the rest of newly-unified Canada. Ten years of reconnaissance surveys on foot and horseback preceded…

The Union Pacific Railroad tracks visible in the right half of this image connect Pulpit Rock near Echo City with Portland and San Francisco. The town provided coal and water for trains entering Echo Canyon. Echo began as a stopover on the Mormon…

After the Civil War, telegraph and railroad companies created new demands for natural resources. The four major western survey expeditions mapped geological features and mineral resources of the Western Territories targeting military posts and…

In 1874, Congress debated civilian versus military control of the four western mapping surveys. Hayden’s Survey, mapping the western territories, joined the U.S. Department of the Interior. Named for explorer Zebulon Pike, the area grew in the 1890s…

Images of natural landmarks were also part of the North American views published by the Detroit Photographic Company. When New York was the nation’s capital, Alexander Hamilton picked Patterson as a site for an industrial city in 1792 based on the…

Like postcards, photochrom prints appealed to consumers as souvenirs of landscapes, tourist attractions, and idealized locales. Carmelita Garden in Pasadena showcased plants from around the world, all seen thriving in Southern California’s mild…

Barnard moved to California in 1887 to inaugurate the new observatory at Mount Hamilton near San Jose. He discovered the first non-Galilean moon of Jupiter, Amalthea, in September 1892, over 275 years after Galileo's discoveries. Observatory staff…

Exotic foreign locations--Cuba, Buenos Aires, Moscow, Ceylon--formed part of the Detroit Photographic Company’s images. The company sold images across multiple formats as postcards, photochroms, and sets of lantern slides. "Scenic and Architectural…

The three-day battle in 1863 produced the greatest bloodshed of the Civil War. Monuments, tours, and photographs were produced rapidly to commemorate the fallen. The memorial cemetery opened in 1864. John Batchelder designed this 1892 monument and…