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After the First World War, the United States was seized with a renewed interest in the nation's early history. This movement fueled the creation of museums and archives that sought to document early American life. Feverishly active in this time period was Frances Benjamin Johnston (1864-1952), who created an extensive photographic archive of early American buildings known as the Carnegie Survey of Architecture of the South. Unlike the work of many of her contemporaries, Johnston's archive has fallen into obscurity. Although the Carnegie Survey was exhibited and praised during Johnston's lifetime as a precious resource for future generations, it is now widely unknown and largely inaccessible. This important archive rivals the early work of the Historic American Buildings Survey and the Farm Security Administration photographs. The history of how Johnston realized her idea of a pictorial building archive is one of the great stories of creativity and perseverance during the Depression. Most relevant for current scholars, the specific methodology used to construct the Carnegie Survey makes it valuable for a variety of modern research applications. Johnston's archive is a lost treasure still within our grasp.

A nationally known photographer since 1890, Johnston's illustrious career included photography of six successive presidential administrations, portraits of notables such as Mark Twain, architectural commissions for McKim, Mead, and White, submissions to international expositions, garden photography, and extensive magazine work. For the last third of her life, Johnston worked to document the buildings of early America, organizing and completing the Carnegie Survey for the Library of Congress. Many are familiar with the ongoing Historic American Buildings Survey, but few are aware that the Carnegie Survey predated it.

The dimensions of the Carnegie Survey are vast. Johnston traveled through Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Louisiana, Alabama, and Mississippi and took 7,248 negatives of pre-Victorian buildings. Nearly 3,000 of these photographs were taken in Virginia, the first state documented for the survey. Johnston photographed historic structures in sixty-five Virginia counties, visiting nearly all the early settlement areas and tracing established migration patterns. The methodology Johnston used to create the Carnegie Survey was very different from many of her contemporaries. A popular style in that period was the atmospheric, sentimental depiction of old buildings, visible in the work of Wallace Nutting and Henry Forman. Johnston composed photographs using a standardized system that captured the maximum amount of information at a site. She photographed building exteriors from consistent angles with clear, in-focus compositions that captured architectural details and the surrounding landscape. Interior photographs recorded features such as paneling, mantels, plasterwork, staircases, and doorways. Viewing the series of photographs taken at a site all together leads one systematically through the spaces of early Americans in a logical, comprehensive manner. Johnston's survey techniques led to the creation of intense regional concentrations of photographs, grouped by county, which illustrate regional microcosms of early building types and the transmission of forms through migration. Johnston's interest in commonplace structures led her to document an unusually high number of vernacular buildings and agricultural outbuildings. Corncribs are depicted with the same respect as mansions.

The data supporting a photograph were important to Johnston, and she dedicated a significant amount of time to preparatory research. The fieldwork travel itinerary was based on consultation of old maps, land deeds, and other primary records. Johnston also worked closely with a number of prominent architects, including Thomas Tileston Waterman, Milton Grigg, and Edmund Campbell. Their active professional partnership included collaboration in scholarly publications, shared fieldwork trips, and the exchange of expertise. Johnston's photographs illustrated many of their books, and in recognition of her architectural contributions, the American Institute of Architects (AIA) inducted her as an honorary member in 1945.

Johnston articulated her motivations for starting the Carnegie Survey in a radio interview with Mary Mason of the National Broadcasting Company:

The idea of this research came to me several years ago when I returned to Virginia to photograph some of the famous James River estates. Wherever I traveled I came across tragic examples of decay and neglect. Often, too, fire had destroyed and left no trace of some of these once-beautiful homes. Of course, the most noted manors in Virginia have been photographed often and well. But the old farm houses, the mills, the log cabins of the pioneers, the country stores, the taverns and inns, in short those buildings that had to do with the everyday life of the colonists had been overlooked. In fact, no photographic records of them existed . . . My work soon brought me into touch with others who had imagination and the means to support my research. It really began with my photographic survey at Fredericksburg, Virginia, sponsored by a woman who had vision and who shared my belief that such records should be made before it was too late.1

Local resident Mrs. Daniel Devore funded Johnston's 1927 photographic survey of the buildings in Fredericksburg, which was a crucial prototype for the Carnegie Survey. The variety of buildings Johnston documented in Fredericksburg is evident in her later work. In addition to large estates, she photographed stores, cabins, outbuildings, taverns, quarters, warehouses, churches, an apothecary shop, a market square, City Hall, a cemetery, Monroe's law office, a spinning house, and unusual structures such as a garden house and a toll-keeper's house. The project also served to record the greater urban landscape of Fredericksburg, an early colonial town. In 1930 Johnston took her portfolio of Fredericksburg photographs to Leicester Holland, architect, Chief of the Division of Fine Arts at the Library of Congress, and chairman of the AIA Committee on the Preservation of Historic Buildings. Johnston donated her Fredericksburg photographs to Holland's Division of Fine Arts and proposed the continuation of the project throughout Virginia. With Holland's support and funding from the Carnegie Corporation, Johnston spent the rest of the 1930s documenting early American buildings throughout the South.

The Carnegie Survey photographs are available for study in the Prints and Photographs Reading Room at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., or in a 1985 microfiche edition of the survey owned by some university libraries. The University of Mary Washington has digitized a selection of Johnston's Fredericksburg photographs and made them available online at their Department of Historic Preservation Web site (http://departments.umw.edu/hipr/www/fredericksburg/johnston.htm). More than four hundred Louisiana photographs for the Carnegie Survey are available online from the Louisiana State Museum at http://louisdl.louislibraries.org/cdm4/browse.php?CISOROOT=/FJC. The Carnegie Survey is a rich, untapped resource that could support historical inquiry in a variety of fields. It is time to rediscover Johnston's archive.

The author recently completed a master's thesis on the Carnegie Survey at the College of William and Mary.

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1 Frances Benjamin Johnston, interview by Mary Mason, in The Collection of Frances Benjamin Johnston, reel 21, Manuscripts Division, The Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.