Frank Lindsay Crawford collection of Harvard photographs

Frank Lindsay Crawford, lawyer, was born on October 14, 1856, in Poughkeepsie, New York to Morris D’Camp and Charlotte (Holmes) Crawford. He received his AB from Harvard in 1879 and his LLB from Columbia in 1882. Crawford began practicing law in the New York City office of Olin, Rivers & Montgomery in 1881. In May 1883, he started his own law practice with his brother in New York City which he maintained until 1905, when he began his new partnership Crawford, Harris & Goodwin. Crawford was one of the lawyers representing Standard Oil in the antitrust law suit brought by the federal government in 1909. He married Genevieve Buckland in 1885; they had four children. Beginning in 1917 and continuing for more than twenty-five years, Crawford served as President of the Board of Trustees for the Kent Place School for Girls in Summit, New Jersey, where his family had moved in 1889; he was also one of the organizers of the New Jersey Harvard Club, which was founded in 1904. He retired from active practice in 1935 and completely retired in 1941. Crawford died on May 10, 1950, in Summit, New Jersey.

G.W. Pach was a New York City-based photographer, whose firm specialized in photographing collegiate athletes and student groups; his branch offices were located in college towns including Cambridge, Massachusetts and New Haven, Connecticut. Pach was on the Harvard campus in May 1879 to photograph student groups for inclusion in the Harvard College Class of 1879 class album. Prints of College officers, seniors, student groups, and campus views, as well as albums in which to house the prints, were available for purchase from Pach.

The first Harvard class album was produced for the Harvard College Class of 1852 in the form of daguerreotypes of class members arranged alphabetically in a wooden cabinet.The Harvard College Class of 1855 added photographs of the College officers, and views of the campus were first included by the Harvard College Class of 1858. The Harvard College Class of 1862 added photographs of student groups; athletic teams began to be featured in the 1860s. The size of the albums in which the photographs were housed grew larger over time; the increasing cost, along with changing mounting techniques, forced a gradual decrease in the number of photographs included: by 1896, only individual portraits of seniors were included. The traditional class album was further threatened by the printed class book. In 1889, The Harvard portfolio, was published, a predecessor to the later Harvard class album and the Harvard yearbook, which continues to be published today. The original series of photograph albums were no longer produced after 1908.