William H. Weinland photograph collection

The William H. Weinland Photograph Collection contains 525 loose photographs and 3 photograph albums that depict the people, experiences, and places witnessed by Moravian missionary William H. Weinland (1861-1930) and his family during their years of missionary service between the mid 1880s and the 1920s, first in Alaska and, more extensively, among Native Americans of Southern California. Though the vast majority of the photographs depict life on the Morongo Reservation, near Banning, California, Weinland was an itinerant of sorts, an activist who sought a foothold for Protestantism wherever he could. Consequently, there are images from a number of the reservations that surrounded Morongo.

The Alaska images were photographed by Weinland and fellow missionary Henry Hartmann, as many of the mounts attest, and by the commercial photographer M. Lorenz. The Morongo views are harder to attribute, though many were definitely taken by Weinland himself. Some commercial photographers are also represented throughout this portion of the collection. Volumes 2 and 3 were albums compiled by Sarah Morris, one of the first schoolteachers at Morongo and a personal friend of the Weinlands. Her albums focus, naturally enough, on the schoolhouses where she taught as well as her charges. There are about 50 original film and glass plate negatives in the collection. Contact prints were made for reference use and are in Boxes 1 to 5, according to subject. See the Negatives series for a list of the item numbers.