Cows in a field, with barn and church or school building in background, undated

The Colin C. Stewart photograph collection comprises thousands of images from the late-19th and early-20th centuries. Although the collection includes many photographic prints and lantern slides, the majority of images are glass-plate negatives in various sizes. The subject matter of these images is largely centered on scenes of Dartmouth College, but the collection is extremely wide-ranging, touching on scientific interests (flora and fauna), musical themes (images of composers, ancient instruments, and musical notation), travel, and art history.

The breadth of the collection, coupled with the unknown identity of its donor (or the exact time of its arrival at Dartmouth, sometime in the late 1970s or early 1980s), raises questions about how many of the images were collected solely by Stewart. Several negatives, for example, were originally housed in a box labeled “W.R. Waterman.” William Randall Waterman was a Dartmouth history professor from 1921 to 1960, and a local historian as well; his own papers are collected at Rauner Library (MS-638).