Sources

Pictures and permissions

Everything on this site comes from a public archive, and every picture is credited on the page it appears on. This page says where each body of material comes from, and how to reach me about any of it.

I. The drawings

The plans are from the Olmsted Archives at the Frederick Law Olmsted National Historic Site, National Park Service, in Brookline, Massachusetts. Job numbers, plan numbers, titles, dates, sheet sizes and inventory notes are as recorded at olmstedonline.org, and the scans are the ones the Archives publish through Flickr. Titles and inventory notes are quoted exactly as catalogued, including the archive’s own spellings and errors; where a sheet contradicts itself or the record, the page says so and leaves both readings standing.

II. The photographs

Most of the period photographs are held by the Lenox Library Association and reach this site through Digital Commonwealth, the Massachusetts digital repository. They fall into two collections, and the Library states their status differently.

The Edwin Hale Lincoln Photographs carry the rights statement “No known copyright restrictions,” with a request to contact the Library about reuse. Lincoln was born in 1848 and died in 1938, and the photographs used here were made between the 1880s and the early 1930s. They are credited on this site as Edwin Hale Lincoln. Lenox Library Association.

The Local History Photograph Collection is licensed by the Library under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0, with a few items under Attribution 4.0. Those images are credited to the Lenox Library Association with the license named. Where the Library has marked an item all rights reserved, it is not shown here, and several pages say which picture has been left out and why.

A smaller number of photographs come from the Library of Congress, chiefly the Detroit Publishing Company collection, and are used only where the Library of Congress records no known restrictions on publication.

III. The books reproduced whole

Five volumes are on this site page for page, and each carries its own rights position.

The three county directories — Briggs & Co.’s Berkshire County Directory for 1874, the South Berkshire Directory for 1923–’25 and the Central Berkshire Directory for 1926 — are scans published by the Internet Archive, all of them published long enough ago to be out of copyright.

The 1904 Barnes & Farnham Atlas of Berkshire County is the Boston Public Library copy, reached through Digital Commonwealth, whose rights statement for it is “No known copyright restrictions” and whose license is “No known restrictions on use”. The State Library of Massachusetts holds a second digitized copy of the same atlas whose scans require prior written permission. That copy is not used here, and no image on this site comes from it.

Central Berkshire Illustrated (Pittsfield, 1890) is Boston College’s copy, digitized by the Internet Archive through the Boston Library Consortium. It was published in 1890 and is in the public domain.

In all five, the page images are re-encoded for the web at their full scanned size and nothing is retouched, reoriented or cleaned up. The foxing, the tape repairs, the binding shadow and the library stamps are left where they fall.

IV. Titles, captions and corrections

Captions in quotation marks are transcribed from the archive’s own record or from what is written on the negative, the print or the mount. Where a caption is this site’s description of what a picture shows rather than the archive’s, the page’s sources paragraph says so. Nothing quoted is silently corrected.

V. If a picture is yours

This is unfunded research about the towns the pictures were taken in, and it exists to send people back to the collections it draws on. If you hold rights in anything here, or you are the institution that holds it and you would like the credit line to read differently, write to me and I will change it or take the image down. No argument, no delay.

Write to me here and I will answer.