Alan Christian (WBAL Talk Radio host) with reenactors outside Oella Community Hall, 1976.
Johnnycake Junior High Band, 1976.
This summer, the United States began celebrating its 250th anniversary as an independent nation. Many of us gathered with friends and family, attended cookouts, watched fireworks, and thought about what it means to be an American. The Fourth of July is ripe with tradition that dates back to July 3, 1776. That’s right, the day before the Second Continental Congress adopted the ratified Declaration of Independence, John Adams wrote his wife Abigail stating, “It ought to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more.”
Continental Soldier student band, 1976.
And the very next year that is exactly how people celebrated, decorating their towns with colorful streamers and illuminating the night sky with grand firework displays. John Adams and Thomas Jefferson would both die on the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, prior to its official status as a national holiday.
Fifty years ago, in 1976, the small town of Oella, Maryland celebrated America’s Bicentennial. The Maryland Traditions Archive houses three collections that centers on Oella, including the Mills of Baltimore County collection which features these wonderful photos. Tucked away in the woods along the Patapsco River outside Ellicott City, Oella was built in 1808 as a mill village for the workers of the Union Manufacturing Company. This textile manufacturer would eventually be taken over by W.J. Dickey & Sons, Inc. who produced men’s high-end woolen suits.
Woman in front of flower stand, 1976.
Generations of families worked and lived alongside one another within Oella’s secluded hills. And just like in small towns and large cities across the United States, Oella’s residents came together as citizens and neighbors, continuing the long tradition of our country’s Independence Day celebration. Families would pack large picnic lunches and go out to what was known as “Picnic Woods.” There were sack races, potato races and baseball games. In the evening, there was dancing on a large wooden platform that had been erected a day or so earlier by the mill carpenters.
Abraham Lincoln reenactor reciting the Emancipation Proclamation, 1976.
Ola Belle Reed and family performing for Oella, 1976.
Oella’s Bicentennial festivities featured a parade with Continental soldiers; the Johnnycake Junior high school marching band; Girl Scout troops, and military veterans; as well as a reading of the Emancipation Proclamation by an Abraham Lincoln reenactor and a performance by Ola Belle Reed and family. It even had those creepy Belly Button Whistlers I had so happily forgotten about.
Belly Button Whistlers, 1976.
We only have the photos from the bicentennial celebration in Oella – no diaries or videos exist in the collection. Looking at this archive is like looking into a family photo album from the past, you can almost smell the honeysuckles and charcoal grills, and hear the conversations and laughter between neighbors. It gives a feeling that the comradery and magic is still here. We just need a reminder once and a while.
Oella residents at festival, 1976.
Coll349: The Mills of Baltimore County collection is available for research in our Reading Room. This post was written by Mark Breeding, Maryland Traditions Archivist.
Sources: Adams, John. Letter from John Adams to Abigail Adams, 3 July 1776. UMBC Special Collections, Maryland Traditions Archive. Mills of Baltimore County collection, Series I, Subseries I.C, Box 1, Folder 48.
Join the Albin O. Kuhn Library & Gallery’s Special Collections department throughout the Fall semester as we commemorate 250 years of Maryland history. All semester long we will have exhibitions, events, and online programming highlighting the items in our collections that support scholarly historical research in Maryland. A full description of programming in Special Collections and the Library Gallery is below.
Lewis Hine in Maryland
[This little six-year helper in Rock Creek berry field, near Baltimore, Md., was working hard. They begin about 4:30 A.M. and sometimes work until sunset. Her family (Scholtz) has been South–Bluffton, S.C.–for a few years. Seen in Appalachicola and Biloxi. They are Polish.] Location: Baltimore, Maryland.
The Library Gallery exhibition, Lewis Hine in Maryland, is open to the public through December 18, 2026. In July 1909, documentary photographer Lewis Hine (American, 1874–1940) visited Maryland, photographing child workers at Bottomley berry farms in Anne Arundel County and at the J. S. Farrand Packing Company in Baltimore. Drawn from UMBC’s Photography Collections, this exhibition explores the places and people behind these photographs. A selection of Hine’s most iconic and enduring images situates his Maryland work within the broader context of his documentary project.
Lewis Hine in Maryland is accompanied by an installation of two works from artist Lisa Oppenheim’s Spine series, in which she appropriates images by Lewis Hine from the Library of Congress. Enlarged to life size, the photographs depict the backs of adolescent textile workers whose bodies were curved and misshapen by their labor.
Curatorial tour and opening reception, Thursday September 17, 5:00 p.m. Free and open to the public.
Panel Discussion: Food and Labor in Maryland, Thursday October 22, 6:00 p.m. Followed by a reception. Free and open to the public.
Closing reception, Thursday December 4, 6:00 p.m.
Aerial photograph of UMBC campus, 1966
UMBC’s 60th anniversary
UMBC opened in 1966 and our students, faculty, staff and larger community of scholars has continued to make history over the past 60 years! A university history exhibit, curated by Library staff member Emma Sigrist, will be on display in the Library Rotunda from September 18 – November 1. Join Emma and archivist Lindsey Loeper on Wednesday October 28 during free hour for a hands-on exploration of university history including the first volumes of The Retriever Weekly and student yearbooks.
Women’s movement in Baltimore
The Library Rotunda exhibit “What is Liberation?”: Women’s Movement in Baltimore will be on display in the Library Rotunda from November 2 – 30. Curated by Morgan Dowty, program management specialist in the American Studies department, the exhibit brings together ephemera collected from a wide range of feminist activities occurring in Baltimore between 1970 and 1990. The exhibit borrows its title from the second issue of Women: A Journal of Liberation and the items on display are drawn from collection 334, the women’s movement in Baltimore collection, and the Alternative Press Center Collection.
Maryland 250 blog series
All semester, Special Collections faculty and students will be highlighting items in our collections that connect us to Maryland’s history. Weekly posts will be available on the Special Collections blog and on the Library’s myUMBC page.
Page spread from Marion Warren, The Eye of the Beholder. Maryland State Archives, 1989.
#PhotobookFriday
Your favorite Instagram series is back this semester with a full list of Maryland photography books. Follow us at @umbcspecialcollections and don’t miss a post!
The Special Collections department at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County has two open field study placements for the Fall 2026 semester. Part of the Albin O. Kuhn Library & Gallery at UMBC, Special Collections collects materials of enduring historical and cultural value—housing, preserving, and making accessible materials that are original, rare, unique, fragile, and archival. Our collections and staff support UMBC’s research and educational mission and its dedication to cultural and ethnic diversity, social responsibility, and lifelong learning. UMBC is located in Catonsville, Maryland, just off of I-95, 695, and 195. Parking will be provided. Interested students should submit a current resume and 3 professional or educational references to Beth Saunders, curator and associate director of Special Collections, at bethsaunders@umbc.edu. Application review will begin in July and applications will be accepted until the positions are filled.
Collection Level Records
UMBC Special Collections plans to adopt Archives Space as our new content management system as our collections have outgrown our current system, PastPerfect. For this project, we are performing a mass review and standardization of our records to support this transition. It is our ultimate goal to have a public facing record for each archival collection to significantly improve access to our unprocessed collections.
The metadata standardization intern would exclusively work on ensuring that the required fields to publish a collection level record for unprocessed collections are complete. This position provides the selected student an opportunity to learn and expand on their research skills while aiding our department in increasing the visibility of our collections. This is also a publishing opportunity for students, as they will be listed as a co-author of finding aids, the primary descriptive resource of an archival collection.
Students will be provided various research tools to reference, including our current content management system, PastPerfect, to populate a standardized google form, which will give Special Collections staff access to data that can be quickly published to our Special Collections finding aid site.
Maryland 250 Outreach and Exhibition
UMBC Special Collections will be participating in the statewide Maryland 250 celebration this Fall. Our collections include extensive documentation of Maryland’s history including social activism, media and print culture, documentary and fine art photography, folklife traditions and artistic communities, and more! MD250 activities will include a multi-author blog series highlighting collection items that support research about Maryland communities, artists, and industry; at least two physical exhibits in the Albin O. Kuhn Library & Gallery’s Rotunda display space; an outreach event for the UMBC campus community; and related promotional content on the Special Collections Instagram page (@umbcspecialcollections).
The field study student will contribute to these projects throughout the semester by:
assisting with photo documentation,
text and display creation, editing, scheduling, and publication,
exhibit planning, design, and installation,
and staffing events.
The student will work directly with a broad range of collection materials and will gain experience writing about historical, primary source items for a general audience. Experience working with WordPress or a similar web publishing platform is preferred. The student will have the opportunity to co-curate at least one exhibit using collection items from Special Collections. The student will also learn general Special Collections procedures for security, handling, digitization, and general use of collection materials. While weekly on-site work at UMBC will be required, this may be structured as a hybrid position.
When I started working in an archive, I had a vague vision of what that would look like. Mostly, it involved carefully handling rare, centuries old books, painstakingly cataloging collections, and rehousing the materials in fancy grey acid free boxes. I didn’t expect to become a photography detective. But over the past three months, that’s exactly what I’ve been doing.
Special Collections graduate assistant Reese Finningan
Let me start at the beginning. I was hired to be the graduate assistant in the Albin O. Kuhn Special Collections and Archives a year ago, upon my acceptance into the graduate program to study history. I started in August, and spent the first few months training and acclimating to the new position. At the end of October, I got my first long-term assignment, working with the curator and head of the department on their project.
The year prior was the fiftieth anniversary of our photography collection, and in the fall of 2024, they had put on an exhibit in our gallery showcasing the collection. The project was to turn that exhibition into an exhibit catalogue — a type of art book which contains all the objects from the exhibition and their context. For me, this meant pulling all the photographs which were showcased for digitization and measurement.
Over the next four months, I went through the process of locating individual photographs in our collection of over two million. Using our database records, I found their shelf location, removed them from the box, measured the sheet and the image, and set them aside for digitizing, before reshelving them in their permanent home. Over that time, more photographs got added to the project, making this a continual cycle, until finally, in late February, we got to our final image set of over two hundred fifty.
As simple as the process seems, it required meticulousness to ensure the correct items were being removed, and that they were returned to their proper location. In some cases, even the first step of pulling the photograph wasn’t straightforward. A very simple problem-solution set, paired without updating a small detail in the record, can make items much more difficult to find. For example, many of the photographs I couldn’t initially find had been relocated due to size. For the exhibition, they’d been placed into mats, making them larger than the original box they were housed in. When they were reshelved, they had to be moved to a larger box, and sometimes this move got missed in updated records. A few of them even came from unprocessed collections, meaning there was no detailed record of them in the first place!
About half of the boxes that house the photo prints from the Baltimore Sun collection
These miniscule adjustments created a series of miniature mysteries for me to solve. At the end of January, once I’d gone through the entire image set and collected all the photographs, I was left with a stack of images I couldn’t find on the first pass. Double checking the information on the call slips against the information in our online databases quickly helped me find several photographs, which had typos in the original call number or location on my first search. For others, I searched in boxes by photographer last name, or photographic process.
Eventually, I was left with half a dozen or so odd cases, photographs which were decidedly not in their listed location, but which didn’t have an obvious resolution. Luckily, I had time on my side. These photos didn’t need to be pulled quickly – they needed to be tracked down and recovered through the kind of patient, precise detective work that archival research often requires and caring for a collection demands. I rolled my sleeves up, pulled on my gloves, and got to work. Using the information I had about the photograph as clues, I searched full boxes until, one by one, I found what I needed.
The missing photo on exhibition
After about a month of this meticulous, slow search, I’d found all but one photograph, and everyone in the archive knew it was going to be the most difficult to track down. The photo had come from our collection of prints and negatives from the Baltimore Sun, a sweeping collection of more than three hundred boxes. The prints we have are arranged by subject, not by date or photographer, and for many of them, we have very little identifying information. Such was the case for this one: all we had was a title, (potentially created by the curator for the exhibition,) the photograph measurements, and a few blurry pictures of it in the exhibition.
This is where my detective work really came into play. Applying the few clues I had to my growing knowledge of our photography collection, I searched almost two dozen boxes in search of this photograph. Knowing the photo had been matted for the exhibition, I began with our photography collection, guessing it had been reshelved there after the exhibition. The photographer wasn’t identified: I searched the four “photographer unknown” boxes we have, with no results. Knowing the photograph was from the Baltimore Sun, I searched the two boxes of our Baltimore collection: nothing. In the exhibition spreadsheet, it was tagged as “Baltimore Camera Club,” but it wasn’t in our boxes for that collection either. Within the Baltimore Sun boxes, I searched by subject, based on the data I had and on what I was seeing in the images I’d been sent: “Fashion,” “Model,” “Swimsuit,” “Bathing Suits,” “Baltimore Camera Club,” and so on. By this point, I’d recruited most of the department into brainstorming ideas, and was actively encouraging people to think outside the box on where it could be. But after a few weeks of this, I’d still not been able to locate the photograph, and I was ready to give up.
In a last ditch effort, I decided to really think outside the box, and searched in the box titled “Art.” In that box, I found a folder titled “Art/Photography,” with a subfolder for “Art/Photography/Baltimore Camera Club Exhibition.” My heart jumped; this felt like the breakthrough I’d been waiting for. About twenty images in, suddenly, I saw those recognizable stripes and figures I had been looking for since October. Months of small clues, dead ends, and careful checking had finally come to an end. It was hard to contain my pride and satisfaction — I may have done a Tiger Woods-style fist pump. There’s a particular joy in archival work when patience and persistence pay off like that, a quiet thrill in realizing that a piece of the collection that once seemed lost had simply been waiting in the right place to be found again.
Baltimore Sun photographs
As I continue to learn on the job, I gain new insights to a career in the archives every day. One of the biggest things I’ve learned so far is that we live in an imperfect world. Archivists love order, but try as we might, we can’t control everything, and unfortunately, things like dust, age, and human error can cause real problems. But this doesn’t mean that we should just give up, or stop trying. Instead, it’s even more important to think creatively and approach problems from multiple perspectives. When faced with road blocks, use the information you have, and the people around you, to find a new path to the destination you aim to get. Persistence and optimism will take you far!
And so, for now, that’s my life in the archive: part preservationist, part cataloger, and occasionally, part detective. Each box and folder holds its own small mysteries, and every solved puzzle feels like restoring a tiny piece of the historical record. While I may still spend plenty of time rehousing materials in those familiar grey boxes, I’ve learned that archival work is just as much about curiosity and persistence as it is about order and organization. The search for a missing photograph might seem small, but moments like that are a reminder of why the work matters: because every item we preserve, find, and make accessible helps ensure that the stories contained in the archive continue to be seen and understood.
This post was written by Reese Finnigan, Special Collections graduate assistant and MA student in the department of History at UMBC. Thank you, Reese!
We often think of books as sacrosanct – and as a librarian, I have to agree! Many people can’t abide writing in, dog-earing, or otherwise defacing a book. But there are cases where changing the structure of a book can be a creative rather than a destructive endeavor. Enter the altered book.
What is an altered book?
Altered books are “a form of mixed media artwork that changes a book from its original form into a different form,” thereby changing both its functionality and its meaning. These alterations can be, according to book artist Barbara Pearman “as simple as adding a drawing or text to a page, or as complex as creating an intricate book sculpture.” Over the past year, I have had the opportunity to catalog two altered books for Special Collections. While they were very different from one another, each presented a similar cataloging challenge, and a similar opportunity to reflect on the meaning of printed books.
1. Index, 2014-2024
The first of these two altered books was Index, 2014-2024, which we added to our Bafford Photography collection in December 2024. In this work, photographer Jordanna Kalman inserted prints of her own photographs into an existing book: The History of Photographyby Beaumont Newhall.
Newhall’s book is a seminal work on photographic history, but notably, only 4% of the photographs in his book were taken by women. Kalman’s work is a response to that imbalance: by inserting her own works into the book, she is making a statement about the lack of women’s representation in the field of photography, while simultaneously refuting it.
2. The Worlds to Which we Pass at Death
Kalman’s altered book is a kind of conversation: the substrate (the book being altered) is as much a part of the message as what she adds to it. By contrast, the second altered book I cataloged for our collection appears to have been created with much less intentionality in its choice of substrate.
This second altered book is titled The Worlds to Which we Pass at Death. Written by Rev. George Vale Owen in the 1920s, it is an example of “automatic writing,” a process in which spirits allegedly possess a medium and communicate using their body to write. This piece of Owen’s work was originally published in the newspaper The Weekly Dispatch, but at some point thereafter, an anonymous reader took their newsprint copy and pasted it into the pages of the novel Alton Locke by Charles Kingsley. It was this hybridized hardback copy that I cataloged as part of the Eileen J. Garrett Parapsychology Foundation Collection in August 2025.
Unlike Kalman’s Index, it doesn’t appear as if this creator intended the underlying book to be a notable part of the finished product. In fact, they removed all evidence of the original book by covering its title and publication information and cutting out all additional pages. I even had to shine a light through the title page in order to read the original title and finish my cataloging! This implies that their main motivation was preservation: by pasting the fragile newsprint into a hardcover book, this anonymous reader was attempting to prevent Owen’s work from being damaged.
And yet, the choice to transform the text from newsprint to monograph seems like more than just a utilitarian measure. I think it speaks to the lingering regard for the book as a source of legitimacy that this unknown spiritualist wanted to see Owen’s words between the covers of a hardback book. In a way, Kalman’s work too speaks to this shared regard: it is only because she treats The History of Photography as a stand-in for society’s collective consciousness that her act of adding women literally to the book can take on the significance of adding them symbolically to the annals of human knowledge.
Cataloging challenges
From a cataloging perspective, each of these items presented a unique challenge. While we have to treat the altered copy as a separate work from its unaltered original, it is still important to acknowledge the connection between them in the catalog record. The way I went about recording this was by adding a citation for the substrate text under “Related Titles.” If you click on one of the links above to view the catalog record of either altered book, you will see a hyperlinked title near the bottom of the record:
You will also see the term “Altered Books” listed under “Genre” – clicking this will pull up a list of all items in the library’s collection that are either examples of altered books, or discuss them:
Conclusion
The relationship between books and readers is never a neutral one: we transform books every time we use them, wearing out their spines and hinges little by little. But altered books take this transformational aspect of readership to a whole new level – and in doing so, help remind us of our tactile relationship with the printed word.
In earlier periods of book history, humans would create paper, set type, and sew bindings entirely by hand. In the modern era, when much of this process has been passed along to machines, altered books remind us of the materiality of books – even going so far as to turn an entire, finished book into a raw material to be deconstructed and re-shaped into a new object.
If you’re interested in exploring altered books further, you can check out this online exhibition from the National Museum of Women in the Arts. You can even make your own altered book from an outdated reference book or other work from a secondhand store that no one is likely to need in the future. Artist Lisa Vollrath even has a crash course on altered books on her website. Just make sure you don’t use any books from the UMBC library!
This post was written by Hannah Jones, Catalog & Metadata Librarian in the Albin O. Kuhn Library & Gallery’s Bibliographic and Metadata Services department. Thank you, Hannah!
