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Don't miss our Beginning Your Research Workshop, live on Zoom Thursday October 23, at 6pm! Find more information or sign up at our Workshops page.
Scope and Content
Digitized from the original glass plate negatives, these images are attributed to local photographer Elmer P. Trevors and were take between 1922 and 1938. With the School being renamed as an Institute in 1928 the captioning includes both the Lowell Textile School and Lowell Textile Institute.
Subject areas of the Trevors photographs consist of graduation events with faculty and students in cap and gown as well as faculty portraits with such notable leaders as LTI President Charles H. Eames and Louis A. Olney. The infrastructure of the organization is also documented with images of the Dye Laboratory, the Mechanical Drawing Room, the Weaving Room and the Cotton Department, as well as textile machinery and laboratory equipment. Student activities include thesis work and dye testing. An event of note captured by Trevors is the dedication of Louis Pasteur Hall. The collection also includes a few unidentified images that are not clearly related to LTS or LTI.
The photographer's notes are not comprehensive but include information of the photographic process of his day such as the brand names of the glass plates used, lens type, length of exposure, f-stop settings, as well as lighting conditions and the time that the picture was taken. The date information that has been recorded ranges from exact, month and year, year only, and unknown.
Historical Note
The earliest incarnation of UMass Lowell, the Lowell Textile School was established in 1897. Modeled after the Polytechnical School at Philadelphia, the school originally opened in three rented rooms on Middle Street in downtown Lowell. The school offered three year diplomas in cotton or wool manufacture, design, or textile chemistry and dyeing. By 1903 the rented rooms in downtown Lowell had given way to the construction of the Lowell Textile School on the opposite side of the Merrimack river, now part of UMass Lowell's North Campus. Southwick Hall, Kitson Hall, and Falmouth Street Building combined superior mill construction with design elements that indicated the special purposes of the institution.
Blewett, Mary H., and Christine McKenna. To Enrich and to Serve : The Centennial History of the University of Massachusetts, Lowell. Virginia Beach, Va.: Donning Co., 1995.
