Archives West Finding Aid

The photographs of Thomas Brook consist of nature landscapes and town views of southwest Montana and particularly in the Twin Bridges area of Madison and Beaverhead Counties. Subjects include natural history, ranch and farming operations, bridges and bridge construction, schools and school groups, and early settlers of the Twin Bridges area. Brook organized the images by assigning sequential numbers for the first 388 photographs, but he often would group several negatives within a given number if they were similar exposures. Many of these early control numbers now bear alphabetic extensions to distinguish the separate images. Starting with image number 389, new control numbers were assigned by the processing archivist, observing a rough subject arrangement of the photographs as they were filed by the MSU library staff in 1966. Again some overlap was found amidst the negatives accompanying the prints, necessitating the assignment of alphabetic extensions for image numbers 409 and 410. Overall there are 1,057 individual images, represented by numbers 1-839. Not all prints are available, especially in the first 388, and most negatives for images numbered greater than 388 are missing. An important exception are the glass plate negatives (numbers 773-785) documenting the 1896 flood at Twin Bridges. The photographer of these images is unknown, and Brook left no clues as to how he came to own them. In some cases for images that lack a corresponding negative, duplicate prints were saved if they showed a difference in darkroom manipulation. For all the images in this collection the titles were provided by Brook either in either his negative index or on the print itself.