About a year ago I realized that the slide carousels in the Bud Morehead Collection contained images that appear neither in his book, A Walking Tour of Rice University, nor in the large collection of photographs that he left to the Woodson. Here are two very early examples.

The first is unlike any other photo I’ve seen of the construction of the Mech Lab and Power Plant. Of the dozens of images William Ward Watkin took of this building going up none captures it from this angle and the presence of text is also completely unfamiliar to me. I have no idea who took this or why:

Note, by the way, the the Institute was scheduled to open in almost exactly four months. I get sick to my stomach just thinking about it.

The second image, a more affecting one, was taken in 1916. Morehead’s slide is labeled: “Physics Building masonry crew.”

Honestly, though, except for the guy on the left they look more like the masonry bosses than like crew. These guys look like crew: