John P. Henderson, 1945-2007, was a school teacher with a degree in Music from the University of Idaho. A railway buff, he traveled the northwest researching and photographing railways of the past and present. In the years prior to his death he broke up and sold off his collected photographs.
The collection consists of photographs documenting the rail lines, the trains, and the buildings and equipment of several northern Idaho and eastern Washington rail companies, notably the Nez Perce Railroad, Camas Prairie Railroad, and the Walla Walla Valley Railway. The Nez Perce & Idaho and the Nez Perce and Pomeroy are also included, though to a lesser extent. The majority of the photographs are black and white negatives dating from the 1960s and 1970s. Where the images are in color, or in other formats (some slides are included), that is noted in the folder descriptions.
The collection is organized into series based on the various rail systems, with full series going to the Nez Perce Railroad, Camas Prairie Railroad, and the Walla Walla Valley Railway. A few other rail lines have individual folders. Within those series, items are organized by subject and then by format. Within each folder, items can have a chronological arrangement, a subject arrangement, or no apparent arrangement (original order), depending on the materials.
This collection is open and available for research use.
Copyright restrictions apply.
[Item Description] John P. Henderson Photograph Collection, 1936-1990
Manuscripts, Archives, and Special Collections, Washington State University Libraries, Pullman, WA.
The collection was acquired in August, 2011 from Marc Entze of Hunlock Creek, PA, and retained as UPC-1103. Mr. Entze had been personal friends with John Henderson; he and a friend, Jim B. Davis, had been gifted many of these materials (the Walla Walla Valley Ry. materials and portions of the Nez Perce Ry. materials) by Henderson. The remainder they purchased after someone else had inherited Mr. Henderson’s photographs and put them up for sale.
Photographs were rehoused in 2017 in protective sleeves by student James Feller, who then photocopied the identifying information on the original envelopes onto archival paper and placed that in the sleeves with the images. The collection was then processed in February, 2018 by University Archivist Mark O’English.
Several documents which came in as part of the purchase were individually cataloged: Camas Prairie Employee Timetable, 1910; Northern Pacific Employee Timetable, Pasco Div., 1913; Northern Pacific Employee Timetable, Idaho Div., 1914. However, these had been acquired independently of the photographs, and are not directly related. A blank single-sheet Walla Walla Railway Company Freight Conductor’s Train Report was moved to MASC’s Historical Ephemera collection.
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.