Photographic postcards made by Adam Clark Vroman of California Missions and Camulos Ranch, part of "Vroman's Series of Postcards." The depicted mission include San Juan Bautista, Santa Clara, San Luis Rey de Francia, San Juan Capistrano, San Gabriel Arcangel, San Antonio de Pala, San Diego de Alcala, San Buenaventura, Santa Barbara, Santa Ynez, La Purisima Conception, San Luis Obispo de Toloso, San Miguel, San Antonio de Padua, Our Lady of Solitude, Soledad, San Fernando Rey, San Francisco de Asis, Carmel (Monterey), and San Francisco Solano. The photographs of Camulos Ranch relate to Helen Hunt Jackson's book Ramona and have the subtitle "Ramona Haunts" with a notation of related book pages.
Adam Clark Vroman (1856-1916) was a bookstore owner and photographer of Southwest Native Americans and culture. He and his wife moved to Pasadena, California, in 1892, where he took up photography, mostly documenting pueblos in New Mexico. After his wife's death in 1894, Vroman opened a bookstore in Pasadena, though he continued to make photography excursions to southern California, Arizona, and New Mexico. He also made photographs for the Bureau of American Ethnology during two expeditions in 1897 and 1899. Vroman's photographs illustrated the 1913 edition of Helen Hunt Jackson's novel Ramona.
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Photo Lot 89-58, Adam Clark Vroman photographic postcards of California missions and Camulos Ranch, National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution
Donated to the Bureau of American Ethnology Library, circa 1911. Transferred from the Anthropology Library, 1989.
Additional photographs by Vroman can be found in the National Anthropological Archives in Photo Lot 14, Photo Lot 92-3, the records of the Department of Anthropology, and the BAE historical negatives.
Correspondence from Vroman can be found in the National Anthropological Archives in the Otis Tufton Mason papers.
The Smithsonian American Art Musem, University of California-Riverside's Museum of Photography, Massachusetts Historical Society, and the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona Libraries hold Vroman photographs.