A recent post about painter T.C. Steele’s remote studio on the Indiana State Museum’s blog by Davie Kean, master gardener at the T.C. Steele State Historic Site, featured this photo (left) from the Lilly Library’s Frank M. Hohenberger Photograph Collection. Mr. Kean also posted to the blog this past August using two other images from the Lilly Library, one of which comes from the Hohenberger collection. All of these photos were used with the permission of the Lilly Library.
Frank Michael Hohenberger, 1876–1963, was a Brown County photographer and newspaperman. He spent his boyhood as a printing apprentice and later worked several years on newspapers in Dayton, Ohio, Louisville, Kentucky, and finally for the Indianapolis Star. In 1917 he left Indianapolis to start a small photography business in Nashville, Indiana, concentrating on the subject matter of Brown County. The next forty–seven years were spent recording the life, customs, and scenes of the hills of Brown County, of other areas of Indiana, of Kentucky, of South Carolina, and of Mexico. From 1923 to 1954 he wrote a column for the Indianapolis Star entitled “Down in the Hills O’ Brown County.” The articles were frequently illustrated with his photographs. Hohenberger, who died in November 1963, willed his collection to the Indiana University Foundation. In 1998 the Foundation transferred ownership of the collection to the Lilly Library.
The Indiana University Digital Library Program is currently involved in the project of digitizing the entire Hohenberger photograph collection and designing a more user–friendly search interface for exploring these images. The project will be completed later this year.