The Grassmere Collection, 1786-1985, is centered around five generations of the same family that lived at Grassmere Farm, Nashville, Tennessee. The property served as a family farm for 175 years. Sisters Margaret and Elise Croft willed the Grassmere property to be used as a nature preserve upon their deaths, and the Nashville Zoo began management of the site in 1997 to honor that request. The digital collection is a sampling of the physical collection and consists of over 250 items including photographs, letters, audio oral history excerpts, maps, memorabilia, and land records.
The Library Photograph Collection is a migration project from our Online Photo Database to allow researchers more extensive description and the ability to download directly from our website. The Library Photo Collection contains images from the Archives Photograph Collection as well as portrait painting photographs, Colonial Dames of America Portraits in Tennessee, and a variety of black and white photographs and lithographs from the State Library and Archives manuscripts division.
The Earl S. Miers River Photographs date from the first decade of the 20th century (ca. 1900-1912) and show steamboats, buildings, people and scenes along the Mississippi and Tennessee Rivers. There are 69 photographs in the collection, 34 of which are displayed here. Many of the photographs depict steamboats belonging to the St. Louis & Tennessee River Packet Company along with crewmen and laborers who worked on them. Images depict mule-drawn ferries, African-American ‘roustabouts,’ drovers loading hogs, oxen hauling cargo, and cross-ties being loaded at a tie yard.
Among the greatest assets at the Tennessee State Library and Archives is the variety of its photographs. Myriad images populate our holdings, many of them rare. The collections highlighted here represent a fine assortment of imagery. For online collections, see the Tennessee Virtual Archives (TeVA), online exhibits and the online photograph and image database. The photo database contains thousands of images taken from major collections, while the online exhibits include dozens of pictures featured in displays staged at TSLA.
