Lloyd Allen Swanger was born in Ione, WA, in 1933. After a military stint in Korea he attended Washington State College, graduating with a B.S. in Agriculture in 1959. Swanger was then hired by the U.S. Forest Service, starting out at Washington’s Colville National Forest. In 1964 he became a resource assistant in the Stevensville, MT, Ranger District, Bitterroot National Forest, and in 1967 was promoted to district ranger at the Kaniksu National Forest, ID. In 1973 he moved to the Colville National Forest’s Newport, WA, Ranger District, and then in 1975 to the Teton (later renamed Rocky Mountain) District at Choteau, MT. In 1988 he moved to the Eagle Cap Ranger District of the Wallowa-Whitman National Forest at Enterprise, OR, where he remained until his retirement.
The collection consists of two photo albums.
Box one contains an album which was created by the United States Department of Agriculture’s Forest Service for promotional use by Forest Supervisors; this is retained in its original binding and order. It includes approximately 85 photographs, well-described but undated (the album presumably dates from the 1950s). Each photo has an official five-digit government identification number. Photographs illustrate potential activities of the Forest Service, and were intended for distribution to the media as necessary. While the majority of the photos are taken in the western United States, they do range all over the country. A few images are missing.
Box two consists of a 104 page album of photographs collected by Mr. Swanger during his time in the Forest Service, specifically 1958-1971, and relates to his positions and activities. The photos are mostly dated and well-described, and cover northern Idaho, northwestern Montana, and northeastern Washington. Subjects include tree plantings, tree thinning, clearing and salvage logging, scaling, forest fire fighting, prescribed burns, trail maintenance, and culvert and road construction. Of note are Boy Scout and women’s club tree planting projects, all-female planting and thinning crews ca. 1970, and the demolition of the Stone Johnny Lookout in 1969.
Each scrapbook is placed in its own box. The governmental scrapbook remains in its original binding and order. While the personal scrapbook has been taken out of its original binder, materials are retained in the order in which they were received, and page numbers have been added to each page to help maintain that order.
This collection is open and available for research use.
The government-produced images are in the public domain, but Mr. Swanger’s personal images may remain in copyright.
[Item Description] Lloyd Swanger Forest Service Photographs, 1950s-1971
Manuscripts, Archives, and Special Collections, Washington State University Libraries, Pullman, WA.
The materials were donated to Washington State University Libraries’ Manuscripts, Archives, and Special Collections on September 14, 2018, by Tania Swanger, and retained as UPC-1805. The materials had originally been collected by Tania’s father-in-law, Lloyd A. Swanger, and had remained in the family’s possession prior to being donated to the MASC.
Mr. Swanger’s personal scrapbook was removed from its generic three-ring binder, and the individual pages’ plastic sleeves were replaced with Mylar. Pages were lightly numbered to aid in retaining original order. The collection was processed in September, 2018 by University Archivist Mark O’English.
Mr. Swanger’s collection of about 100 tourism postcards, each of which lacked any Forest Service tie, was broken up and filed into PC 2, the Historic Photographs Subject File.
This collection is indexed under the following headings in the online catalog. Researchers desiring materials about related topics, persons, or places should search the catalog using these headings.