The Construction News Photograph Collection PI/2009.0004
The Construction News Photograph Collection consists of 1,849 negatives and 621 black-and-white photographic prints (fifty-three of which were made from negatives not in this collection) produced between the years 1953 and 1960. They were used to illustrate stories about Mississippi in the regional magazine The Construction News, which published bid award news and feature articles on all aspects of road and bridge construction and official social events of the people who built them.
The bulk of the images offer a glimpse at construction of Mississippi highways and landmarks, including the Bay St. Louis Bridge (Highway 90 between Bay St. Louis and Henderson Point, ca. 1953), the Natchez Trace Parkway (1956), the Meridian Naval Auxiliary Air Station (1957), Grenada Dam (Grenada Lake, 1953), and the Texas Eastern Transmission Pipeline (ca. 1955). The rest of the images are from meetings of the American Society of Civil Engineers, the Association of General Contractors, the Mississippi Association of Supervisors, the Mississippi Road Builders Association, and the Mississippi Society of Professional Engineers, as well as grand openings of construction equipment companies throughout Mississippi.
read more...The Construction News Photograph Collection consists of 1,849 negatives and 621 black-and-white photographic prints (fifty-three of which were made from negatives not in this collection) produced between the years 1953 and 1960. They were used to illustrate stories about Mississippi in the regional magazine The Construction News, which published bid award news and feature articles on all aspects of road and bridge construction and official social events of the people who built them.
The bulk of the images offer a glimpse at construction of Mississippi highways and landmarks, including the Bay St. Louis Bridge (Highway 90 between Bay St. Louis and Henderson Point, ca. 1953), the Natchez Trace Parkway (1956), the Meridian Naval Auxiliary Air Station (1957), Grenada Dam (Grenada Lake, 1953), and the Texas Eastern Transmission Pipeline (ca. 1955). The rest of the images are from meetings of the American Society of Civil Engineers, the Association of General Contractors, the Mississippi Association of Supervisors, the Mississippi Road Builders Association, and the Mississippi Society of Professional Engineers, as well as grand openings of construction equipment companies throughout Mississippi.
Collection Description General & Tech Data Catalog Record
Collection Description
The Construction News, established in 1934, was published weekly and carried construction contract bid and award news for Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Oklahoma, and western Tennessee. Two times per month, the magazine was supplemented with editorials and color covers featuring current projects and meetings. The Construction News Photograph Collection consists of 1,846 black-and-white negatives and 620 black-and-white photographic prints related to Mississippi news between 1953 and 1960, which were produced for the magazine by photographers including William "Bill" Beard, Dick Eckler, Harry L. Gish, and Dave Gleason.
Provenance
James A. LaMonica, former Administrative Aide to Arkansas Governor Dale Bumpers, purchased The Construction News around 1977 and served as its president. The Arkansas History Commission, now the Arkansas State Archives, arranged for the donation of these Mississippi photographs by the magazine to MDAH in March 1986, just before LaMonica's retirement and sale of the publication in 1987. The Archives and Records Services Division's Reformatting section scanned the black-and-white negatives and prints in June 2015 and December 2016, creating preservation-quality TIFF images. These were then converted to JPEG images by the Electronic Archives section and made available online within the MDAH Electronic Archives Graphic User Interface in 2017.