?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 1,000 - $ 1,500
Sampson Dyer, Mary Arvilla (1883-1976) Archive of Material and Photographs from Hawaii, circa 1907-1911.
Including a photo album in limp suede covers decorated with a original sketches made with a wood-burning tool, featuring a scene of Diamond Head from the water with palm trees, volcano, seagulls, and a whale tail on the front cover, and a single palm tree on the back; the photos beginning with approximately thirty small black-and-white photos taken in Massachusetts circa 1907, followed by approximately fifty original photographs taken in Hawaii, featuring a number of wood frame and stone Christian churches, a building called "The Watch Tower," in Kealakekua; a photo of two people in the crater of Kilauea; others in Hawaiian canoes; the site of Captain Cook's burial place; Nu'uanu Pali; images of the rugged terrain and beaches; Pu'uhonua o Honaunau National Historical Park (formerly called the City of Refuge); ancient hieroglyphs; other stone monuments, geologic features, and ruins; including a stunning image in black and red of the lava flow from a volcano eruption on Kona, taken at night in November of 1919 (as identified on the verso); together with photos of family taken in Massachusetts.
Twelve issues of The Kohala Midget, Kohala, HI: Boys' C.E. Club, Union Church, February 1911-April 1911, and one issue from September 17, 1913; rare, Worldcat citing only one location worldwide, a 1908-1913 run held at the University of Hawaii at Manoa; nothing at auction; The Friend: Oldest Newspaper West of the Rockies, Honolulu, September, 1908; The Eighty-Fifth and Eighty-Ninth Annual Reports of the Hawaiian Evangelical Association, Honolulu: Hawaiian Gazette Co., 1907 & 1911; [and] a brochure on Hawaii from the same period, signed by Sampson Dyer.
M. Arvilla Sampson was born in 1883 in Amherst, Massachusetts to Merritt Foster Sampson and Isadore H. Kenney. She attended the North Adams Normal School and was graduated in the class of 1900 from Smith Academy. In 1909 she married Charles Frederick Dyer. Sampson Dyer taught school in Kentucky, Puerto Rico, and Hawaii with the American Missionary Association, and from the documents and photos here, we know that she was on the islands in the first decade or so of the 20th century.
