Photographs

Christian Hill (N.C.) Universalist Church Picnic
Christian Hill (N.C.) Universalist Church Picnic

The library has a wealth of pictorial resources in printed and archival sources. See the library's Flickr collection of local congregations for a small sample of photos.

While there are only a few works with collected illustrations (for example, Peter Tuft Richardson's The Boston Religion: Unitarianism in its Capital City (Print Only) and Percy Leavitt's Souvenir Portfolio of Universalist Churches in Massachusetts), often there are illustrations in printed histories (look for the abbreviations "ill." or "illus." in the "Description" of the catalog record).

  • Personal collections of photographs, postcards, and drawings of historically Universalist congregations (most notably those collected by Hazel Ida Kirk, Russell E. Miller, and Harry Lee and Mary Grace Canfield) are filed in the Congregational Resource Files; this collection also contains other photographs donated to the library. This collection is arranged alphabetically by city name.
  • Additional photographs will be found in the Records of the Universalist Publishing House, 1862-1961, beginning in box 30. The photographs in this collection were, for the most part, used in the Christian Leader/Universalist Leader in the 1940s and 1950s (with the date of publication noted on the back of the photograph). The file of church photographs is arranged geographically by state and then by city or town within the state. It includes photographs of church buildings, Sunday schools, and other church groups and activities.
  • Additional photographs and other visual material are found in other collections, including individual congregational records and the photographs of Quillen H. Shinn and the scrapbooks of Hazel Ida Kirk.
  • There is a large collection of photographs of primarily historically Unitarian congregations, collected by the Unitarian Layman's League and other Unitarian organizations, in the Council of Liberal Churches' Photographs of Unitarian Universalist Churches collection. Additional photographs and other visual material are found in other collections, including individual collections of congregational records and these congregational resource files.
  • There is a collection of over 1,000 postcards of church buildings, most of which are pictures of Unitarian and Universalist churches. In 2005, the library received a grant from the American Theological Library Association to digitize 878 distinct postcard images. These images are available for searching through the Cooperative Digital Resources Initiative of the American Theological Library Association and Association of Theological Schools. Over 800 of these postcards are in the library's Flickr collection. See Postcards of Unitarian and Universalist Church Buildings for more information on the scope of the project.

To request a scan of a photograph, see Reproduction requests for further information.

For help finding a photograph, please contact a research librarian.

To donate Unitarian Universalist photographs to the library, see Donating Materials.