Four Students Writing on Blackboard in Classroom, 1901

Students posed in a classroom with a white female teacher. Two female and two male students are writing on the blackboard at the back of the room. Each has a name written in front of them. They are, left to right, Theresa Brown, Olaf Gray, John Deloria, and Lena George. 

Cataloging by the Cumberland County Historical Society identifies the teacher as Margaret Roberts. 

In 1901 the Bureau of Indian Affairs contracted with the photographer Frances Benjamin Johnston to document the school at Carlisle for an exhibit at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York. Johnston visited the school in the spring of that year and took at least one hundred photographs. When the school closed in 1918, two albums of Johnston's photographs were sent to the Pennsylvania State Museum, which transferred them to the Cumberland County Historical Society in 1934. This is one of the images from those albums.

The Frances Benjamin Johnston Collection at the Library of Congress also contains a print of this photograph. A copy of that print is available for download from the Library of Congress website: https://www.loc.gov/item/2004676453/.  

This image with the caption SECOND GRADE, ADULT appears in The Indian Industrial School, Carlisle, Pa.: 23rd Year (Carlisle, PA: The School, 1902) [p. 71].

Time Period
Campus Spaces
Location
CCHS_JO-02-02
Photographer
Frances Benjamin Johnston, Washington, DC