Charles L. Camp Collection of Stereographs

Summary

Creators:

Various and Charles Lewis Camp

Extent:

181 photographic prints ; stereograph, some albumen ; various sizes 182 digital objects

Language:

English

Background

Scope and content:

This collection of stereographs compiled by Charles L. Camp consists of 181 photographic prints from circa 1867 to circa 1895. The photographers include Eadweard Muybridge, Carleton E. Watkins, M. M. Hazeltine, Walker & Fagersteen, William Henry Jackson, J. J. Reilly, Barkaiow Bros. (Omaha), Kilburn Bros. (N. H.), Halsey and Coffin, Hayward & Muzzall, C. W. J. Johnson, T. J. Norton, H. T. Payne, A. J. Perkins, J. Pitcher Spooner, Andrew Price, W. N. Tuttle Photo, C. R. Savage, Savage & Ottinger's, William Shew, Chas. Weitfle, R. E. Wood (Santa Cruz), Underwood & Underwood, Edward De Froffs (Sitka, Alaska), T. W. Ingersoll, J. D. McAuliffe (Tucson), and Thomas Houseworth & Co. Included are images of mountains, hot springs, rivers, falls, mining, trains and train tracks, a few California Indian images, city views, camping, and the 1868 and 1906 San Francisco earthquakes. Locations featured include San Francisco, Berkeley, Yosemite, Stockton, Los Angeles, Pasadena, Santa Barbara, the counties of Sonoma, Lake and Napa, Yellowstone National Park, Salt Lake City, Wyoming, Sitka (Alaska), and others.

Captions are found handwritten on or below the photograph, printed below the photograph on the front of the image, or handwritten or printed on the verso. The captions from the fronts of the images and some of the verso captions are reprinted in the container listing. Handwritten captions are indicated with parentheses surrounding the text. Bracketed information was supplied for the container list.

Biographical / historical:

Charles Lewis Camp was born in 1893 in Jamestown, North Dakota. Camp attended the University of California, Berkeley and received his M.A. degree from Columbia University. He served in World War I before returning to Columbia to teach and earn his Ph.D. He then went back to Berkeley and became a Research Associate at the Museum of Paleontology at U.C. Berkeley, where he remained for the rest of his career. Known for his collecting of fossils in Nevada and elsewhere, he became a professor of Paleontology and head of the Department as well as director of the Museum.

Paleontological writings of his include A Study of the Phytosaurs With Description of New Material from Western North America (1930), A New Type of Small Bipedal Dinosaur From the Navajo Sandstone of Arizona (1936), and Phylogeny and Functions of the Digital Ligaments of the Horse (1942). He was a member of the following organizations: California Academy of Sciences, New York Academy of Sciences, Geological Society of America, Paleontological Society, American Society of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists, The Society of Vertebrate Paleontology, Cooper Ornithological Club, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the California Historical Society, and the Pacific Coast Branch of the American Historical Society.

Camp's interest in history led to his association with the California Historical Society beginning in 1922. He contributed to the California Historical Society Quarterly and edited books, such as Kit Carson in California and The Chronicles of George C. Yount. From 1923 to 1935 he was a Director of the Society and a member of its Publications Committee. In this period of time he wrote a check-list of Western History publications and book-reviews for the Quarterly. Camp also edited and expanded Henry R. Wagner's The Plains and the Rockies : a Contribution to the Bibliography of Original Narratives of Travel and Adventure, 1800-1865, first published in 1920.

Camp wrote a book of poetry called Earth Song (1952), which looked at his experiences as both a historian and a paleontologist. He died in 1975.

(Source: Farquhar, Francis P. Charles L. Camp : Biographer of the West. [California? : s.n., 1963.])

Acquisition information:

Gift of Charles L. Camp, 1961.

Location of this collection:

UC Berkeley, Bancroft Library

University of California, Berkeley, The Bancroft Library

Berkeley, CA 94720-6000, US

Contact:

510-642-6481

bancref-library@berkeley.edu

Website