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These albums contain mounted black-and-white photographic prints documenting historic sites and structures along the East Coast of the United States, from the South to New Hampshire, created and collected by architect and historian John Mead Howells. These albums appear to have been created as reference sources for Howell's publications LOST EXAMPLES OF COLONIAL ARCHITECTURE (New York, W. Helbrvn, 1931), THE ARCHITECTURAL HERITAGE OF THE PISCATAQUA (New York: Architectural Book Publishing Company, 1937), and THE ARCHITECTURAL HERITAGE OF THE MERRIMACK (New York: Architectural Book Publlishing Company, 1941). However, many additional images may be found in these albums than were used in these publications. The images were taken during the second half of the 19th-century and the early 20th-century of historic buildings and sites constructed during the 18th- and 19th-centuries. Most images have annotations and caption information in typescript or in Howell's own hand. Howells collected most of the images from a variety of sources, including the Frank Cousins image collection at the Essex Institute, the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, architect Ogden Codman, and the Historic American Buildings Survey. The remainder were taken by Howells himself.

The collection includes two diaries of his American tour (one is made up of his rough travel notes, the other is in edited form for circulation), a memorial volume of manuscripts about his wife (Ann Loxley Rhees) prepared by his daughter Eliza (Mrs. Nicholas Murray), and 1851 passport of Nicholas Murray, a letter of Thomas Chalmers Murray to his sister Mary Jones Murray Butler (the mother of Nicholas Murray Butler, President of Columbia University), correspondence between Welsh historian Gwyn A. Williams and collection donor Mary Butler Brown, an essay entitled "Morgan John Rhees and Beula" by Gwyn A. Williams, Ann Loxley Rhees's valedictory oration on graduation from Philadelphia's Ladies Academy, an address on female education ca. 1789, family obituary clippings, poems, misc. items, and a photograph of Ann Loxley Rhees. An edited version of substantial sections of the diaries of M.J. Rhees was published in John Thomas Griffith's 1910 biography and miscellany of Rhees and his family, a copy of which is included in this collection. An edited version of a previously unpublished section of the diary, from May 2nd to July 9th 1795, was published in Northwest Ohio History (vol. 80, no. 2), but it is an unreliable transcription containing many inaccuracies, according to Dr E. Wyn James of Cardiff University, who is working on a new edition of the M.J. Rhees diaries.

Correspondence, documents and manuscripts from late seventeenth and eighteenth century France, especially from the French Revolution, collected by Sam Schaefler. Authors include J.B. Colbert Torcy and the Duchesse Du Lude. Many of the items from the French Revolution represent the work of the Committee of Public Safety and the Committee of General Security. French Revolutionary leaders represented in the collection include François-Antoine Boissy D'Anglas, Jean-Baptiste-Noel Bouchotte, Pierre Joseph Cambon, Lazare Carnot, Jean-Marie Collot D'Herbois, l'Abbʹe de Fauchet, Philippe-Antoine Merlin de Douai, Jean Victor Moreau. C.A. Prieur-Duvernois, and Antoine Joseph Santerre. In addition, the collection includes a letter from the Danish physicist Hans Christian Oersted to Sir John Herschel, a letter by the French poet Romain Rolland, a document of the Philadelphia Artists' Fund Society of 1846 with signatures of its officers, and an autograph letter and a photograph of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.