Mary Everhard Collection

In 1922, Mary Everhard purchased a photo studio in Leavenworth, Kansas, from Harrison Putney, whose stepfather, Ebenezer Elijah Henry, had founded it in the 1860s. Everhard acquired the photographers’ thousands of negatives and operated the studio until 1968, in the meantime also adding negatives from other local photographers to her collection. At her retirement, she had amassed a group of over 40,000 negatives that spanned a century of the city’s history, but she had trouble finding a local home and eventually sold everything to a private collector who dispersed it in groups. Although the largest group of negatives ended up at the Leavenworth County Historical Society, over 6,000 negatives came to the Carter, including a group pertaining to the 1898 Alaskan gold rush and hundreds of portraits documenting Black communities in eastern Kansas.