Young Students Standing in Classroom, 1901

Young students standing next to their desks in a classroom. 

Cataloging for this image from the Cumberland County Historical Society speculates that they are learning "a finger song." 

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.