Scope and Contents: Faytima Pond, a Springfield native attending Illinois State Normal University, created this album as a Geography course paper after a field trip around the state. For two weeks, the 40 students in the class, led by Robert G. Buzzard and assisted by Mabel Crompton, rode 2,300 miles by bus. Faytima Pond's album, "The Geography of Illinois," includes her day-by-day writings, maps, and photographs as well as pictures clipped from books to complement her analysis of the state's economic geography. The album also includes other clippings and photographs of the class. A copy of the student newspaper, The Vidette (July 20, 1926) announced the field trip and pictured a map of the route.
Among the places visited were Quincy, Rock Island, Port Byron, Galena (smelters), Apple River, Zion City, Ottawa, LaSalle, Streator, Depue, Elgin (sewage treatment), Chicago (stock yards), Urbana, Mattoon, Olney, Lawrence and Cumberland (oil) counties, Olney, Shawneetown, Cairo (levees, Sears home-parts warehouse), Jackson County, Cahokia (mounds), Decatur, and New Salem, Petersburg, and Springfield (Lincoln sites).
The album was donated to the Library by Vincent Golden, of Worcester, Mass., whose aunt was a college friend of Faytima Pond.
| Illinois History and Lincoln Collections
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