Gardens for a Beautiful America, 1895-1935: Photographs by Frances Benjamin Johnston

Frances Benjamin Johnston was one of the first professional American women photographers and a leader in the house and garden movement that emerged with new wealth at the turn of the 20th century. In the 1940s Johnston deeded to the Library of Congress her collection of 1100 hand-colored lantern slides produced for lectures on garden design and planting that she delivered across America in the 1920s to gardening Americans living in the East, West, North and South.
Drawing from a rare archive in the Library's collection, Gardens for a Beautiful America features 250 reproductions of hand-colored glass lantern slides, not seen for over 70 years and presents photographer Frances Benjamin Johnston front and center in the Garden Beautiful movement, as both Progressive Era advocate and artist working with garden clubs and horticultural societies to green tenement lots, parks and row house yards devastated by Gilded Age pollution and neglect.