Man of the Streets
Harris Stilson’s films offer rare scenes of Richmond a century ago
A century ago, Richmonder motorman Harris H. Stilson ran one of the city’s now-defunct streetcars along the Old Clay Street line for 25 cents an hour. An amateur photographer, he brought his camera along to work and shot footage across the Richmond area. Traversing Richmond with an early motion film camera, he recorded some of the earliest moving images of the city from 1929-1933. Now, viewers can explore the newly available restored films that captured snippets of everyday life.
Stilson’s great-granddaughter, Kathleen “Kitty” Snow, donated the films to VCU Libraries’ Special Collections and Archives. Snow inherited thousands of photographs and several tapes that had been hidden in her father’s garage, and realized that they recorded unique moments from an unusual perspective. Her interest led her to form Richmond in Sight, a non-profit organization that has pieced together community records and oral histories based on Stilson’s documents. Snow has written four books containing the photographs and their histories, several of which are available in Special Collections and Archives.
Support from a National Film Preservation Foundation Amateur Film Preservation Grant allowed VCU Libraries to digitize the nearly 100-year-old Stilson reels, describe the collection and make it freely available on the Libraries’ digital collections platform. The grant both safeguarded the fragile films and opened them to a much wider audience.
Categories Digital collections, Films and Videos, History, Richmond, Special Collections and Archives