Archives West Finding Aid

The Helen H. Marburger Photograph Album is comprised of approximately 450 photographic prints, negatives, and items of ephemera generated between 1920 and 1926. The album contains only minimal annotations and none of the people appearing in the album are identified by name. However, the album is tentatively identified as featuring and having been created by Helen Marburger based on a comparison of the album’s photographs with images from the 1925 and 1926 Beaver Yearbooks.

The album predominately documents the recreational activities of Marburger. It also features numerous other women, men, and children, apparently friends and family of Marburger. Several other women in the album attended Oregon Agricultural College (OAC), including Jessie Armstrong, a 1925 graduate who is pictured throughout the album.

The album contains 385 mounted photographic prints. Photographs taken at OAC are comprised of scenes of women on campus in 1924-1926, with photos of Marburger and Armstrong wearing graduation gowns and mortarboard caps. The majority of the album documents recreational activities such as camping and hunting trips, horseback riding, picnicking, and swimming. Regional landmarks appear throughout the album and include Mt. Rainier; Tule Lake; the Central Oregon lava fields; the Oregon coast; and Crater Lake National Park. The album also includes photographs from Thanksgiving (1924), a Labor Day trip to Garibaldi, Oregon (1925), and an Independence Day celebration (1925). While the majority of the album’s photos appear to have been taken in Oregon, the album does contain photos from outside the state, including images of the Garfield Park Conservatory in Chicago.

In addition to the mounted photos, the album includes 10 loose photographic prints depicting Marburger posing around campus; the Women’s Building; ROTC cadets and band; a ship off the Oregon coast; and two images of football coach Paul J. Schissler—one as a young man and another clipped from the October 1927 edition of the OAC Alumnus. Also included are 58 loose nitrate negatives comprising similar scenes and subject matter as the collection's prints. Some of the negatives duplicate prints found in the collection.

The album also contains several loose, typed sheets of literary quotes and short poems by a number of writers including Edgar Guest, Edward Rowland Sill, and Alexander Pope. It also includes a program for the 1927 Mother-Daughter Banquet; a ticket stub for the 1926 Homecoming game (University of Oregon vs. Oregon Agricultural College); and a “rook” ribbon, a green ribbon traditionally worn by freshman women on the OAC campus.

The loose prints, typed pages, and ephemera have been removed from the album and stored separately. The nitrate negatives have also been separated and are housed in offsite storage.