Male and female students posed, seated and holding sheets of music, with a white female teacher standing in front, in a class room.
A note on the reverse of the image identifies the teacher as Miss Senseney.
Johnston took two very similar photographs of this classroom. The other version can be seen in Related Images.
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.
This image appears with the caption MUSIC CLASS in The Indian Industrial School, Carlisle, Pa.: 23rd Year (Carlisle, PA: The School, 1902) [p. 86].