(WOMEN'S HISTORY.) Tintype album kept by early Vassar student Harriet Griggs. 52 gem portrait tintypes, each about 1 x 3/4 inches, mounted in album with 17 of them identified in pencil, with later note taped inside cover reading "Harriet Griggs Barker's classmates at Vassar and others." Morocco gilt album, leaves 3 1/2 x 3 inches, backstrip coming detached and worn; some paper album overlays worn, most photographs with light hand-coloring to cheeks, a few with surface cracking, a few trimmed to ovals; all edges gilt. No place, circa 1865
Harriet Barnes Griggs Barker (1845-1918), born in Roxbury, MA and then living in Faribault, MN, enrolled as a freshman in the inaugural Vassar College class in 1865. She did not graduate, and married Civil War veteran Elmer John Barker of the 5th New York Cavalry in McHenry, IL in 1876; they raised three sons and eventually settled in Crown Point, NY. Her daughter-in-law, Harriet Provost Fisher (1886-1974), successfully completed her Vassar degree in 1907, and her granddaughter, Janet Barker (1916-1973) was in the graduating class of the college in 1937.
Among the identified sitters are Harriet Griggs Barker and her mother Paulina Dyke Griggs; and her friends the Lincoln sisters of Boston (Annie, Cornelia, and Mary, daughters of silversmith Albert Lamb Lincoln). Unidentified photos include several young women, but also 2 photographs of a puppy, and 4 images of the same young man at different ages, including two in which he wears his military uniform; his kepi has the initials "JG.".
