Mira Lloyd Dock (1853-1945), the first woman appointed to the State Forest Commission, used nearly 500 glass lantern slides to illustrate her lectures at the Pennsylvania State Forest Academy and at speaking engagements in the early 1900s.

Now a portion of the Mira Lloyd Dock collection is being made available online by Penn State University Libraries for students, teachers and the public through a special series of webpages.

The slides are primarily black and white pictures of tree and plant specimens, although a small number of the slides were meticulously and beautifully hand-colored. Many of the pictures were taken in Pennsylvania, especially the Harrisburg area and Wetzel’s Swamp/Wildwood Park in particular. Landscape and historic scenes in other U.S. states as well as European sites are also included.

Most of the pictures appear to have been taken by either Mira Dock or the Harrisburg photographer and printer J. Horace McFarland.

Mr. McFarland shared Ms. Dock’s interest in the City Beautiful movement and served as the national president of the organization at one point. Katharine Gordon Breed’s and a Mrs. Schaeffer’s names appear on some of the slides as well.

The Dock slides are housed in the Penn State Mont Alto Campus Library Archives and were being heavily used by students and scholars. The slides were housed in the original wooden glass slide containers and were in no discernible order. Most were very dirty and fragile. The collection was chosen for digitization to decrease handling and thus preserve the originals and improve access to the collection.

Visit the Mira Lloyd Dock collection online.

9/15/2006