Female students posed in reading room. A student is looking at one of the newspapers displayed in racks along the wall. There are piles of newspapers or other periodicals on the table in the center of the room.
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 with the caption GIRLS' READING ROOM appears in The Indian Industrial School, Carlisle, Pa.: 23rd Year (Carlisle, PA: The School, 1902) [p.54].
