1880s – 1890s Cornell University Class Photo Album owned by Walter Douglas Young of Aurora, New York and Maryland.

With the only 19th-century photograph extant showing a model toy house attached to a man’s shirt…

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Cornell University class photograph album owned by Walter Douglas Young (1870-1945) with his portrait and his classmates. Young was born in 1870 in Aurora, New York. After graduating from Cornell, he worked as an electrical engineer for the B&O Railroad and was president of The Electromechanical Company in Baltimore. His was in the Maryland National Guard signal corps and coast artillery. In the First World War he was a major in the Engineer Corps, US Army. Young died in Maryland in 1945.

Many of Young’s classmates at Cornell were in fraternities. They autographed their class photographs, giving them to Young. They are:

Juan A. Almirall (1891); Raymond Almirall (1891), architect; Leonard Thurlow Beecher (1889), co-founder of Cornell’s Chi Psi chapter; Ethelbert W. Brown, an American painter from Arizona who studied with Whistler and exhibited at the Paris Salon and the Pan-Am. Exposition in Buffalo; Albert S. Crane (1891); (W.E. G___ Jr., (1894); F.M. Farwell (1891); Charles P. Knowles (1891), Pennsylvania railroad surgeon; George Milik Mashek; Voyta F. Mashek (1889); George McAlpine (1891); Harry C. Palmer; Charles W. Rassler (1889); Charles Goodwin Sands (1890), the Charles Goodwin Sands Memorial Medal is named after Sands; Claude R. Scott (1889), co-founder of Cornell’s Chi Psi chapter and “instrumental in securing for this successful fraternity the Flake-McGraw mansion in Ithaca for the chapter house”; Floyd M. Shoemaker (1888); Zalmon G. Simmons (1888); Milton Smith (1887); John B. Van Cleft (1889) of Norwich, New York; Louis E. White; and a Sidney A. ____ (1895) Eleven additional student portraits are not identified.

There are also: 2 photographs that show two men, likely Young’s classmates, costumed in minstrel apparel: one man holds a tennis racked and has a model toy house attached to his costume, the other man has a sword and pistol, both have nose and ear-rings and stand over a guitar case. The other image shows two students dressed as Confederate Civil War officers. 

Additionally, there are five photographs of young women, alone and in groups, one group costumed; six images of Young’s future wife, Alice Gertrude Eldred (1870–1953); 6 stunning photographs of floral arrangements, likely from their wedding; 16 images of unidentified individuals that were photograph in Auburn, Aurora, and Seneca Falls, New York.

Price: $1,250.00