Provenance

MHAC received the Appleton Collection in 1988, 100 years after the first photograph was taken. Frank Lees, a lifelong Media resident whose collection still forms the basis of the Media Historic Archives, arranged for the donation of the negatives and an accompanying index from Appleton’s granddaughter, Anna Catherine Appleton Tyler of Salisbury, Maryland. Tyler likely received the collection after the death of her aunt, Sue Appleton, in 1977, at which time the Appleton house at 341 W. State St. was probably cleared out and sold. The vast majority of Appleton’s roughly 2,000 photographs were captured on 4 x 5 inch, 5 x 7 inch, and 8 x 10 inch glass negatives. Lees had contact prints made of roughly 100 of the negatives, but most of the images remained unseen until the collection was unveiled on this website in 2018.