Frank Edmund Burke was born in Michigan in 1865. He moved to Montana in 1888 and in 1898 began his education at the Montana College of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts (later Montana State University). He also studied at Cornell and Michigan State College. Burke eventually became head of the chemistry department of the experiment station at Bozeman and served in that capacity until 1939. He married Sarah Mariah Lowe on December 26, 1905 and the couple had one son. Professor Burke died in Bozeman, Montana on May 15, 1948.
By 1910, the Anaconda Copper Company had already successfully defended its smelting operation in Montana from a lawsuit filed by Deer Lodge valley agriculturalists, but a new challenge, this time from the federal government, claimed that the smoke from the company’s smelters was damaging the national forest as well as the valley’s domestic plant and animal life. As they had done before, the Anaconda Company hired a team of expert witnesses to gather evidence to refute the charges, among whom was Professor Burke. Burke took a number of photographic images of the Deer Lodge valley on behalf of the Company, presumably to provide evidence that there was little to no environmental damage as a result of the area smelter.
The sixty-eight glass plate negatives in this collection were created by Burke or attributed to him by the library staff that initially accessioned the material. Most of the images are of rural scenery presumably in the Deer Lodge valley, although several images of the town of Anaconda, along with two of the Willow Glen Stock Farm can be easily identified. No inventory or description of the plates created by Burke are available, but images numbered 1 through 44 bear his name as photographer and have the date etched on the negative. Many gaps can be seen in this numbering sequence and it is unknown where the missing images can be located. Images numbered 46a through 55b have no dates, attributions, or even numbers on the negatives themselves and were likely arbitrarily added to the original numbering sequence by library personnel after accessioning. A second series of twelve stereoviews which bear numbers and dates of exposure (but no photographer attribution) can be found in box three.
This collection is open for research.
Original glass plate negatives created by Frank Edmund Burke in 1910 were discovered in the office of Montana State College chemistry professor Birger Lars Johnson in 1965 on the eve of his acceptance of an emeritus appointment. Johnson then donated them to the Special Collections department of the college library.
This collection was processed 2016 June 1
(Photo marked as #40)