?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 2,000 - $ 3,000
(MAINE.) Heavily annotated Bowdoin College photograph album / yearbook for the Class of 1860. Gilt printed title page reading "Class of 1867 Bowdoin"; 67 mounted photographs (almost all with inscriptions on facing pages) including a view of the recently erected King Chapel, 57 members of the Class of 1860, and 9 portraits of the faculty and staff. 4to, disbound text block, accompanied by well-preserved gilt morocco front board and backstrip; minor wear; all edges gilt; extensive clippings and ephemera tipped or laid in. Brunswick, ME, 1860
The most famous man in this album is undoubtedly Joshua L. Chamberlain, who was at that time a recent Bowdoin graduate who served as a professor. He is shown without the drooping moustache he favored in later years, and signed across from his portrait "Very truly your friend, J.L. Chamberlain, June 5th 1860." He would soon reach the rank of Major General as Maine's leading Civil War hero, was Maine's governor from 1867 to 1871, and then returned to Bowdoin as its president.
The recently deceased professor Parker Cleaveland had no photograph, but is represented by a lithograph and clipped signature. Two future Congressmen from the Class of 1860 appear, including Amos Lawrence Allen and longtime powerful Speaker of the House Thomas Brackett Reed. Many members of the class served as officers or surgeons in the Civil War, and three gave their lives. William L. Haskell was a captain in the 7th Maine Infantry who would be mortally wounded at Antietam. Lieutenant Charles S. McCobb would be killed at Gettysburg with the 4th Maine Infantry, and Lieutenant Abram N. Rowe would be killed at Winchester. A manuscript Bowdoin memorial to Rowe is laid down following his portrait.
On the other end of the socioeconomic spectrum is a photograph of Thomas A. Curtis, "alias Diogenes, the college chore boy, boot black, &c. . . . a well-informed man, had many choice books, had evidently once seen better days, but would never impart to anyone his early history."
The yearbook was owned by 1860 graduate Horace Harmon Burbank (1837-1905), who published a history of the Class of 1860 in 1882, and used this album for keeping extensive notes on his classmates through 1904.
