Featured Collection
In 1997, a small treasure was rescued from a local landfill and placed in Special Collections. Simply named "World War I Photograph Album," this item has no traceable history, but its contents illustrate an important event in our country's history. The album contains about 120 black and white snapshot photos of wartime views and more than a dozen commercial photographs of French scenes, particularly in Savenay and Saumur, France.
Most of the photographs are not of high quality, but the range of images - including trenches, artillery, biplanes, nurses, farmers and maneuvers - tells a wartime story in pictures that is not duplicated. The presumed owner of the album is photographed with a bandaged arm and may have been sent to the American base hospital in Savenay for care. Savenay was the site of the largest medical center in France for American Expeditionary Forces during World War I.
Please contact Special Collections at 678-839-6361 to view the actual album. To view the photo album online, connect to: http://www.flickr.com/photos/uwglibrary/. For more information about the Savenay army hospital, see Raymond Shiland Brown's 1920 A History of the Work of the New York Hospital Unit During Two Years of Active Service, available at http://books.google.com/.
