Rare Books
[Tracts. Nos. 1-46]
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Capistrano Substation (1-46)
Visual Materials
The Southern California Edison collection of negatives and photographs consists of approximately 80,000 images created and acquired by the company from approximately 1883-1989, with the bulk of the collection covering 1910-1960. Formats include glass and film negatives, photo cards, loose photographs, photograph albums, lantern slides, and related materials. Most of the images were produced by Edison staff and contract photographers to document Edison facilities, products, operations, activities, and employees and for the purposes of education, advertising, training, and liability. The SCE collection offers a range of subjects far broader than the company's original intent. In addition to infrastructural images of transmission lines, steam plants, substations, equipment, vehicles, and hydroelectric plants, the company captured the uses of light and electricity in its myriad capacities, including night lighting of streets, billboards, storefronts, and gas stations; electric kitchens and appliances in domestic and industrial settings such as restaurants and cafes; agricultural innovations in the dairy and poultry industries; lighting for recreational uses such as swimming pools, bathhouses, tennis courts; golf courses; office work; and accident scenes and disasters, particularly the St. Francis Dam disaster of 1928.
photCL SCE
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Nos. 1-190
Visual Materials
This collection contains 372 stereographic photographs (including some variants and duplicates) by photographer A. A. Hart that document the construction of the western half of first transcontinental railroad by the Central Pacific Railroad between 1864 and 1869. The collection includes all but seven of the original series, numbered from 1 to 364 by Hart (lacking 193, 323, 333, 358, 359, 362, and 364). The images chronicle the advancement of the railroad over 742 miles in California and the Sierra Nevada Mountains, Nevada, and Utah. The majority of the photographs are views of mountains, lakes, rivers, and forested areas (some with stumps from clear-cutting in the foreground), often with railroad tracks running through the center of the images. In addition, there are also images of locomotives, Chinese and other workers, equipment, bridges, tunnels, frontier and mining towns, construction camps, as well as some images of Native Americans, including Paiute and Shoshone Indians. The stereographs primarily contain Hart's own Sacramento imprint with series titles including: "Scenes in the Sierra Nevada Mountains"; "Scenes in the Valley of the Sacramento"; "Scenes in the Washoe Range"; "Scenes on the Humboldt River"; and "Scenes near Great Salt Lake". Interspersed in the collection are stereographs published without credit to Hart by Frank Durgan and Carleton E. Watkins.
photCL 184