News & Updates

New Root Family Photos in the College Archives

By Katherine Collett

July 15, 2015

The college archives recently acquired a collection of photographs of the family of Elihu Root, Class of 1864 (Nobel Peace Prize winner, Secretary of State to Theodore Roosevelt, etc.), from the estate of his granddaughter, Julia Grant Dietz, Trustee of Kirkland College, thanks to Robert Kanyok P’18 firstly for alerting us to the ebay listings and secondly for his generous donation to help cover the cost of acquisition.

Highlights include an ambrotype of Elihu Root as a young man; an 1870 autographed carte de visite of Elihu; tintypes, cabinet photos, and CDVs of Elihu’s father, Professor Oren Root, class of 1833, his mother, Nancy Buttrick Root, and his siblings; a CDV of an elderly woman, labeled “Old nanny who brought up Sheldon Root’s family” (Sheldon was Oren’s brother; Elihu’s cousin Lynott Root was also in the class of 1864); a CDV of Mrs. Horatio Gates Buttrick (Polly Barnard), wife of the college’s superintendent of buildings (see https://my.hamilton.edu/magazine/fall06/faces-behind-the-facades) and Nancy Buttrick Root’s mother; and an 1849 daguerreotype of Ned Buttrick (Edwin L. Buttrick, class of 1842).  The collection also includes a photo of Dr. Thomas S. Hastings, class of 1848, son of the composer Thomas Hastings, and himself the president of Union Theological Seminary clearly taken at the same session as the photo of Hastings in http://www.digitalhistoryproject.com/2011/09/by-archibald-c-mackenzie-outline-sketch.html. 

We are happy to add several photos of women connected to the college (in the Root, Buttrick, Hastings, and Hopkins families) to our photograph collection.

You may see the description of the collection at http://archives.hamilton.edu/repositories/5/accessions/1971.