Boone, Samuel Moyle

Samuel Moyle Boone (1919-2008), native of Gates County, N.C., and son of William Jordan and Minnie Belle Williams Boone, received his A.B. degree in 1949 and his Masters of Library Science in 1964 from the University of North Carolina. Boone served as a member of the staff of the Academic Affairs Library (now the University Library) at the University of North Carolina for 30 years. He was appointed head of Photoduplication Services in 1952, in which role he is credited with building the Library's microfilm collection. Also a photographer, Boone shot local events, portraits, campus scenes, and scenic views, and photographed for the "Alumni Review" during the 1950s.

Samuel Moyle Boone (1919-2008), native of Gates County, N.C., and son of William Jordan and Minnie Belle Williams Boone, received his A.B. degree in 1949 and his Masters of Library Science in 1964 from the University of North Carolina. Boone served as a member of the staff of the Academic Affairs Library (now the University Library) at the University of North Carolina for 30 years. He was appointed head of Photoduplication Services in 1952, in which role he is credited with building the Library's microfilm collection. Also a photographer, Boone shot local events, portraits, campus scenes, and scenic views, and photographed for the Alumni Review during the 1950s. He spent five years on staff at Duke University's Perkins Library after his retirement from UNC-Chapel Hill.

Frances Benjamin Johnston was born 15 January 1864 in Rochester, New York. Her family later moved to Washington, District of Columbia. In 1882, at the age of 18, she attended Notre Dame Convent in Govanston, Maryland. The following year Johnston departed for Paris, France, to study studied art at the Académie Julian. After her return from Paris in 1885, Johnston enrolled in the Art Students' League in Washington.

Johnston's interest in art shifted to journalism, her mother's occupation, and she began to make illustrations for newspapers. She eventually turned to photography because she thought it was the more accurate machine and studied under Thomas William Smillie, head of the Division of Photography at the Smithsonian Institution. Johnston worked on many important projects during her storied career, including the Carnegie Survey of the Architecture of the South between 1933 and 1940. The survey was a systematic record of the early buildings and gardens in Maryland, Virgina, the Carolinas, Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana, Florida, and Mississippi.

Johnston's original negatives for the project are at the Library of Congress, which has become the principal repository of her writings and photographs. The Frances Benjamin Johnston Collection at the Library of Congress includes approximately 20,000 photographs and 3,700 glass and film negatives. Images in the collection span the period 1864-1940, but the majority date between 1897 and 1927. In 1936, the American Council of Learned Societies paid Johnston $3,500 to photograph early North Carolina architecture.

She had three mentors for the project: from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Albert Ray Newsome, North Carolina historian and former history department chair and Howard Odum, sociologist of the American South, professor, and founder of the Sociology Department, the School of Public Welfare, the Department of City and Regional Planning, and the Institute for Research in Social Science; and from Duke University, William Boyd, history professor and first Director of the Libraries.

Frances Benjamin Johnston died in 1952. Source: The Woman Behind the Lens: the Life and Work of Frances Benjamin Johnston, 1864-1952, by Bettina Berch. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000.