Male and female students posed in a classroom. A group of male students, with a white female teacher, are at the front of the room looking at a chair atop a table. On the blackboard behind them is written: "Conversation Lesson / Subject: The Chair." Also written on the board may be the date March 25, 1901.
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/2004676659/.
This image with the caption FIRST GRADE, ADULT appears in The Indian Industrial School, Carlisle, Pa.: 23rd Year (Carlisle, PA: The School, 1902) [p. 70].
