Hundreds of rare Civil War pictures sold to Library of Congress and will be available online

The Library of Congress bought 500 Civil War photos from a Houston housewife. She had been collecting the rare photographs for 50 years.

Robin Stanford, 87, sold her collection of stereograph photographs to the Library of Congress on Friday. On Sunday, they announced that the first 77 images are available online.

President of the Center of Civil War Photography, Bob Zeller, called the photographs “tremendously significant,” according to Time Magazine. He described them as real “scenes of slavery in America.”

Some of the images were taken by Confederate photographers, and they depict life as a slave in the South. Most previous photos depict slaves who were freed in the North. Stanford said the images are like rare ghosts from the past that reflect a portion of history, Detroit Free Press reported.

Some of Stanford’s other photos illustrate plantations in South Carolina at the beginning of the war. For example, one image shows South Carolina slaves worshiping in a plantation church. Another set show President Abraham Lincoln’s 1865 funeral procession.

Stanford started her collection in the 1970s. She first found an old stereo viewer with some photographs at an antique show. So, several of the photos are stereo photos or two photos of the same frame that are printed on one card and meant to be seen in 3-D using a stereo viewer.

Originally, Stanford had planned on donating her trove of photos to her son John. However, he died unexpectedly in 2014. She decided to sell pieces of her collection to support her grandchildren and her daughter-in-law in finishing their educations.

Stanford had mixed feelings about parting with the photos. She said that she is going to miss her collection. Nevertheless, she is happy the images will be “available for everybody.”

She asked that the purchase price remain private. Zeller mentioned that the photos could be worth up to $1,000 per photograph.

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