Scholars, the general public, and special collections libraries are increasingly aware of the importance of visual images in examining the past.1 With the proliferation of sophisticated digitization technologies, researchers now have the opportunity to “see” images in new ways. No longer considered secondary to text and used merely to illustrate the written word, visual materials are taking their rightful place as primary evidence that document the past and influences our understanding of the present. The Library Company of Philadelphia supports this continuing focus on the historical importance of visual culture. An independent research library specializing in American history and culture from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries, the Library Company was founded as the first subscription library in the country in 1731 by Benjamin Franklin and his Junto of fellow tradesmen. Serving as the library for Congress in the later eighteenth century and the city library during the nineteenth century, the Library Company transformed itself in the mid-twentieth century into a closed-stack research facility to both preserve and provide the best access to its nationally and locally significant collections of rare books, manuscripts, broadsides, ephemera, prints, photographs, and works of art.Through its 281-year history, the Library Company has collected visual material and since 1971 has maintained a separate graphics department, with current holdings at over 70,000 items. Among the visual treasures are Peter Cooper's Southeast Prospect of the City of Philadelphia, a circa 1720 painting believed to be the earliest painted view of a North American city; an 1844 William and Frederick Langenheim daguerreotype showing a crowd gathering outside of militia headquarters during anti-Catholic riots, often referred to as Philadelphia's first news photograph; and the three-volume elephant folio of John James Audubon's Viviparous Quadrupeds of North America (1845–48), filled with 150 beautifully hand-colored lithographs of wildlife. The Library Company also holds subject and genre collections rich for visual study, including more than 8,000 late nineteenth-century trade cards, many relating to popular medicine; nearly 800 mid-nineteenth-century comic valentines; and a strong collection of books relating to the history of printing, as well as optics and optical equipment dating back to the sixteenth century.Launched in 2008, the library's Visual Culture Program (VCP at LCP) promotes the use of historical images as primary sources for studying the past and fosters research, collection, and interpretation of historic visual material. Through exhibitions, research fellowships, conferences, and public programs, VCP at LCP, under the direction of Curator of Printed Books Rachel D'Agostino and Associate Curator of Prints and Photographs Erika Piola, promotes the creative use of the Library Company's varied collections of visual materials. These programs have included the 2010 Philadelphia on Stone exhibition researching the first fifty years of commercial lithography in the city, and also a talk by local artist Jennifer Levonian describing how the Library Company's Civil War collections inspired her 2011 animated work “Rebellious Bird,” which is also discussed in a blog about her experience accessible on the VCP website (http://www.librarycompany.org/visualculture/index.htm). The website also provides information about the fellowship program and descriptions of past and forthcoming events, as well as an overview of the visual culture materials related to other subject strengths at the library, including Philadelphiana, women's history, economics, natural history, popular culture, and African American history.In the summer of 2011, in further support of the mission of VCP, directors D'Agostino and Piola chaired a panel at the annual meeting of the Society of Historians of the Early American Republic (SHEAR). The panel, “Not Only Prints: Early Republic-Era Visual Culture Research at the Library Company of Philadelphia,” was designed to disseminate awareness of the breadth and depth of the Library Company's visual culture collections, the importance of visual materials as primary sources, and the methods scholars could pursue to perform graphically oriented research. The presenters were Alison Klaum, PhD candidate in English at the University of Delaware; Aaron Wunsch, a lecturer in the University of Pennsylvania's Historic Preservation Program; and Anne Verplanck, associate professor of American and heritage studies at Penn State University. The presenters described the collections they used and why, the insights and conclusions they formed from their work with the materials, and the outcomes from their research.Klaum, currently completing her dissertation “Pressing Flowers: Floral Discourses and the Development of American Print Culture, 1790–1860,” discussed her work at the library for a chapter of her dissertation focused on the historical importance of the interrelationship of graphic depictions and textual descriptions of flowers in understanding nineteenth-century botanical education. Wunsch focused on the Library Company's defining role in forming his understanding of the iconography and construction of the Laurel Hill Cemetery, which he has been researching for over a decade. Verplanck outlined her research at the library for her current project, “The Graphic Arts of Philadelphia 1780–1880.” The following pages contain essays derived from the papers presented by Klaum and Wunsch and the summary of all the presenters' work authored by VCP codirector D'Agostino.Asking scholars to discuss their aims, methods, and discoveries is a risky proposition, like pointing a telescope at your navel. Will anyone want to see the view? Years ago a colleague of mine, fresh from a prestigious fellowship that required him to attend endless academic mixers, captured the problem with this piece of self-mockery: “But enough about me; let's talk about my work.” Despite the risks, my essay does just that. It summarizes insights I have gained about the genesis of Philadelphia's Laurel Hill Cemetery while working with graphic materials at the Library Company of Philadelphia. Those insights will be of particular interest to historians of American architecture and landscape who focus on the early to mid-nineteenth century. But there is a larger historiographic moral to the story, and it is this: study the repository as you study your topic. Archivists and librarians will not be shocked by this injunction, and neither will many historians. If the following case study reinforces an old maxim and enhances interest in one of the richest collections of antebellum visual culture in the United States, then this glance backward through the telescope will (almost) be justified.1Architectural historians tend to put architects first. When I began researching Philadelphia's Laurel Hill Cemetery as an employee of the Historic American Buildings Survey some fifteen years ago, I quickly discovered that existing scholarship on the site fell into two categories: cultural histories of something called the “rural cemetery movement” and narrower design histories, written by people with training like mine, that explored the work of architect John Notman.2 Laurel Hill, established in 1836, was America's second major rural cemetery, postdating Boston's Mount Auburn by five years. Although the differences between the two institutions were marked, their founders shared an interest in burial reform that combined urban civic pride with ideas about health, horticulture, history, class, and family that were as private and sentimental as they were public and scientific. I also learned that the person most responsible for giving architectural form to these impulses at Laurel Hill was John Notman.Focusing on architects when writing design history isn't wrongheaded but it can be self-contained and, potentially, self-fulfilling. The scholarship on Notman was generally rigorous and well written. Better still, it fell within my comfort zone. While I quickly perceived that rural cemeteries were complex cultural and material phenomena trailed by disparate business records, drawings, photographs, poems, and diary entries (to name only the most obvious primary sources), it was initially reassuring to know that the story of the cemetery's creation followed developments in architecture and landscape gardening I had learned about in school and was, at first glance, tidy. It went something like this: Laurel Hill Cemetery took shape on the banks of the Schuylkill River beginning in 1836. The site's rolling terrain, mature plantings, and river views appealed particularly to John Jay Smith, the most active promoter of the cemetery plan and the eminent librarian of Philadelphia's Library Company. He and three like-minded collaborators followed convention by holding a competition for the design of the new institution's buildings and grounds.3 The winner was John Notman, a recently arrived Scottish carpenter with significant architectural training who vanquished leading local architects Thomas Ustick Walter and William Strickland. The result was an arboretum-like, gardenesque landscape adorned with neoclassical, Gothic, and vaguely Chinese buildings housing various cemetery functions. While Walter was called in, or perhaps volunteered, to improve Notman's gatehouse drawing, Notman received credit for the project overall, and it effectively launched his nationally important career.4Notman as lone wolf—or close to it. That story cohered, and it got me through a report for the National Park Service and earned a National Historic Landmark nomination for the cemetery. But there were annoying loose ends. Citing the work of Keith Morgan, historian Constance Greiff suggested that a British architect's published proposals for Kensal Green Cemetery near London had been available to competition entrants and had influenced both Notman's ground plan and an unrealized Gothic entrance suggested by Walter.5 The “Walter” gatehouse sketch appeared on a larger drawing, also attributed to him, showing wildly writhing paths around a central, churchlike building (see figs.1a and 1b). If the latter feature represented another link to the Kensal Green proposal (and Greiff and Morgan felt that it did), why was the overall composition so rough? Could this really be the drawing Walter, a renowned architect with training as a landscape painter, used to persuade cemetery managers to hire him?These questions brought me to the Library Company in the summer of 2001. A callow doctoral student with a month-long Mellon Foundation fellowship, I wanted to pore over the drawings in question and learn more about the institution that, along with Laurel Hill, had consumed John Jay Smith's mental energies for most of his adult life. The drawings were a mixed bag. In addition to the one attributed to Walter, there was another, more finished one actually signed by him. This called for an Egyptian Revival gatehouse like the one at Boston's Mount Auburn Cemetery. A similar scheme, set forth by William Strickland, was accompanied by a ground plan that showed two stepped terraces (or “amphitheaters”) descending towards the river (see fig. 2). None of this came as a surprise. Other researchers had analyzed these proposals while noting the absence of a signed entry from Notman. But two things became clearer to me. First, the ground plans were based on the same site survey, showing pre-existing buildings (as hatched rectangles) and trees (as dots). Second, although the drawings were few, they ranged from polished to crude. The putative Walter drawing, indeed, appeared to be a kind of worksheet on which designs were being tested, perhaps by multiple hands.The antebellum decades witnessed enormous quantitative and qualitative changes in the production and consumption of architectural books. Before the rise of public libraries in Philadelphia, the Library Company came closer than any other local institution to serving that purpose. Books on architecture and landscape had long found a home there and it made sense that, when thinking about Laurel Hill, John Jay Smith would avail himself of the collection over which he presided. To my delight, I discovered that Smith had compiled a catalog of the library's holdings a year before founding the cemetery.6 Why not peruse the architecture and landscape entries to get a sense of possible design sources?This sort of exercise is open to criticism. At best, it tends to yield generalizations about what so-and-so “might have seen.” But sometimes one can do better. Thumbing through Humphry Repton's Observations on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening (1803), I came across a scheme Repton had proposed as the gatehouse for a large English estate (see fig. 3). Not only did it bear a striking resemblance to its counterpart at Laurel Hill, it also showed pencil marks where someone had begun to sketch in the latter building's doorways and niches. Similar but less satisfying revelations came from other books. John Claudius Loudon's Encyclopedia of Cottage, Farm, and Villa Architecture and Furniture (1833) was missing page 999. Locating the book at another library, I discovered that the excised image likewise recalled Laurel Hill's gatehouse in some very specific ways. If John Jay Smith had allowed someone to draw in the Repton book, or perhaps had done so himself, might he have removed a page from Loudon to facilitate deliberations over Laurel Hill's design or, more bluntly, to instruct Notman?Whatever its dangers, such speculation prompted me to rethink what I knew about Laurel Hill's genesis. Notman was new to this country, his youth and lack of reputation perhaps seen as an asset by the founders of a novel and relatively low-budget institution who had design ideas of their own. What if the whole process had been more open and synthetic than anyone believed, with various players chiming in and various print sources being dropped upon the table? This theory worked better than Notman-as-formgiver because it explained more of the evidence. Whatever its origins, the snaky plan attributed to Walter looked still more like a worksheet. Walter might have made the Gothic gatehouse sketch but someone else likely traced out the winding paths that recalled those proposed for Kensal Green. This rough plan was important. Far more than Strickland's, it prefigured the road and path system that was actually built at Laurel Hill (see fig. 4). Yet Strickland ultimately made a contribution, too. One of his terraced “amphitheaters” found its way into the final design, as did some of the Gothic features Walter (?) had suggested for the cemetery's street front. A combination of Library Company resources, managerial suggestions, and architects' proposals, Laurel Hill's design began to look like a collage.My conversion of Notman into a cipher worried me a bit. His career, after all, was illustrious, as a trip to the Philadelphia Athenaeum, St. Mark's Church, or the grounds of the Virginia State Capitol will remind you. But it was the early Notman, Notman-the-near-nobody, whom Laurel Hill's founders had employed. And it was this humbler, more malleable Notman whose gatehouse design T. U. Walter reworked, making sure the press knew he had done so. Maybe there was a reason no original Notman drawings of Laurel Hill survived. Maybe they embarrassed him. Maybe that unsigned, writhing ground plan is one of them. Again this is speculation. But, again, it led me in new directions and, ultimately, to more solid conclusions. The critical ones are these:First, there was no formal competition for Laurel Hill's design. Architectural historians look for such events as a matter of course but a few handsome rendered drawings do not a competition make. Nowhere in Laurel Hill's records is there mention of a competition. The beautiful Walter and Strickland proposals at the Library Company were surely meant to land their creators lucrative commissions but the very lack of a formal process for receiving them may have fostered the sort of borrowing and recombination that transpired.Second, whatever his skills as an architect, Notman was shakier at landscape. He may well have supplied a general scheme for Laurel Hill's grounds (as he did for later cemeteries) but, as written evidence and a copperplate engraving at the Library Company show, the details were worked out by surveyor Philip M. Price. Price, incidentally, laid out much of Philadelphia's Spring Garden neighborhood and went on to survey the city's Monument and Woodlands cemeteries. A landscape designer without architectural credentials, he remains virtually unknown.7Before concluding, we might revisit the Library Company and the ways the institution's history has shaped its collections. Well before John Jay Smith got into the cemetery business, he was immersed in antebellum print culture. And well before he borrowed Library Company books for their images, he was borrowing their texts.8 In the same years Smith was settling into his post as Librarian, he was forging a second, complementary career as an editor of books and magazines. This work depended on the absence of international copyright; almost all of Smith's publications were reprints, abridgements, or serializations of European works. It likewise depended on Smith's unrivaled access to the Library Company's collections. Smith would borrow and serialize recent works, most notably in Adam Waldie's Select Circulating Library. Whatever gain he received from such ventures, he believed that their contribution to the diffusion of knowledge made them compatible with the Library's mission; indeed, the name “Circulating Library” played on the connection, as did a host of upbeat editorials. And Smith gave back. When his beneficence was brought to the attention of the current Librarian, he replied: “That explains why we have so many copies of Waldie's in our basement.”9Did Smith's work in the world of print affect the shape and character of Laurel Hill? In the course of my dissertation research, I became convinced that it did. Certainly, there were occasional articles about the cemetery in Smith's publications—reprints, of course, but flattering nonetheless. More important, I began to recognize the extent to which Laurel Hill was an artifact of the emerging middle-class literary culture of the antebellum decades. Unlike other rural cemeteries, Smith's branded itself as a literary landscape by placing a sculpture group derived from the tales of Sir Walter Scott at its entrance (see fig. 5).10 Cut by stonemason James Thom, the group features Old Mortality, who traveled the Scottish countryside restoring the epitaphs of Presbyterian martyrs. To the rear stands his faithful pony, while off to the left Sir Walter himself looks on. Historians have seen possible ties between Thom and John Notman, both of whom were natives of Scotland. They have alleged that the sculpture amplified Laurel Hill's resonance with middle-class religious values and longing for familial perpetuity. But might it also be noteworthy that John Jay Smith began his literary career by abridging Scott's Life of Napoleon and made a living through similar work?11There are other such connections, too. Smith clearly valued and, to some extent, shaped, the coverage Laurel Hill received in popular journals such as Godey's Lady's Book. (Here it is worth mentioning how poorly Godey's illustrations reproduce online and on microfilm and how important it is to see the originals at the Library Company.) And when in the mid-1840s Smith obtained the American rights to a lithographic process known as anastatic printing, a new world of possibilities for the repackaging of intellectual property opened up that would again resonate with his cemetery and library work. Antiquarian publications, such as American Historical and Literary Curiosities, featured autographs of people buried at Laurel Hill. There were pattern books like Designs for Monuments and Mural Tablets (1847), whose borrowed English text was followed by images of American cemetery monuments. And, perhaps most intriguing, the anastatic adventure lured Smith into the map publishing business. Perched at the Library Company, he oversaw the tracing of old maps for reproduction. His draftsman was a young English civil engineer named J. C. Sidney, later a major cartographer and landscape designer. Sidney's earliest known work in the landscape field is a late-1840s addition to Laurel Hill Cemetery.12Again, the reader may wonder: what broader lessons can I glean from this story? Here are a few that may be of use, especially to fellow scholars of the built environment. The Library Company's collections of drawings, maps, and photographs are spectacular. Although it is by no means comprehensive, ImPAC, the library's portal to its digital-image collection, offers an important starting point. However, the larger imperative to study the repository as you research your topic stands. Although my own work has focused rather narrowly on Laurel Hill and John Jay Smith, I suspect there is much to be learned about the Library's relationship to the architecture and landscape fields in the antebellum era.13 Many of the leading architects of the day were shareholders in the Library Company. Some had large libraries of their own, but they may nonetheless have checked out expensive or out-of-print works. Nor should we assume the story ends with the likes of Benjamin Latrobe or T. U. Walter. More than kindred institutions such as the Athenaeum of Philadelphia, the Library Company was dedicated to the popular diffusion of knowledge in the new republic. What did this mean for the circulation of architectural books and periodicals? How did it relate to what historian Meredith McGill has called “the culture of reprinting”—the culture in which John Jay Smith was so steeped?14 I don't have the answers but I am hoping future research will get us closer.In the introduction to Flora's Interpreter, or the American Book of Flowers and Sentiments (1832), of which the Library Company of Philadelphia has nine editions, Sarah Josepha Hale supplies two reasons for incorporating Linnaean taxonomy into her collection of floral poems.1 She writes that Linnaeus's choice to use twenty-four categories of plants “seems most gracefully to round the number of classes” and that his system is also the “most poetical.”2 By applying these aesthetic modifiers to abstract botanical theory, Hale links the artistic and the analytical. These surprising associations are indicative of the ways in which writers and editors of many popular nineteenth-century floral texts incorporated botanical theory into their aesthetic study of flowers, basing their choices on the system's beauty rather than on its scientific correctness.Hale's reference to the work of Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus also indirectly invokes the sensual temptations associated with the floral. Linnaeus was famous for revolutionizing botanical studies by devising his “sexual system” for organizing plants that he outlined in his first publication, Systema naturae (1735). Based on the knowledge that flowers house the reproductive organs of the plant, Linnaeus's system divided plants into classes and orders according to the number and arrangement of the stamens (male sexual organs) and pistils (female sexual organs).3 As a result of Linnaeus's sexual system, the flower became integral to the discovery and categorization of new plant species as well as a focal point for metaphors of human desire.4While many scholars have emphasized both the overt and covert sexual associations of floral temptation, they have avoided Linnaeus's warnings about flowers, and how, though flowers house the very means by which the plant can be identified, other features like color may distract the scientific eyes of the botanist.5 Linnaeus's aesthetic caveats about the danger of color in flowers, and his instructions on how botanists must train themselves to perceive abstract ideals in the face of visual variation, also seeped into the discourse of popular American flower books. Common in American educational literature and as subjects for new printing techniques, printed flowers functioned as key sites for cultural concerns about human control and self-restraint, both physical and intellectual.While Linnaeus's influence can easily be traced in the many popular nineteenth-century botanical treatises or floral texts that adopt or reference his taxonomy directly, my research at the Library Company revealed other, less obvious textual evidence of his botanical sway. Floral-themed instructional art books such as A Series of Progressive Lessons Intended to Elucidate the Art of Flower Painting in Water Colours (1818) promote self-discipline and the careful observation and processing of floral nature in a way that echoes Linnaean botanical ways of seeing even in the absence of direct references to botanical theory. Conversely, American language-of-flower books such as Elizabeth Wirt's Flora's Dictionary (1829) showcase the vicissitudes and inconsistencies of floral print culture, which challenge Linnaeus's method for seeing botanically, even as they devote whole sections to descriptions of his sexual system.6Despite their variations in method and focus, these two types of floral genres collectively demonstrate how Linnaean botanical theory contributed to the diverse applications of floral aesthetics in nineteenth-century American popular print culture. And it was my encounter with these two genres in the archives of the Library Company that has significantly shaped how I look at the relationship between visual and verbal floral vocabularies in nineteenth-century printed works.Although Linnaeus likened plant reproduction to sexual relations in the context of marriage, his system still ignited controversy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.7 It inspired Erasmus Darwin's provocative poem The Loves of the Plants (1789), which drew out, through personification of flowers, the illicit potential of multiple female and male sexual groupings.8 Such associations made flowers tricky objects, but sexuality represented only one facet of their desirability. In Critica Botanica (1737), a work that has received little scholarly attention regarding its influence on floral aesthetics in popular culture, Linnaeus identifies several different floral scientific temptations about which the budding botanist needed to be warned.9 Linnaeus asserts in this work that seeing botanically, or being a botanist, required an ample amount of self-discipline and concentration. According to his binomial nomenclature, or the system of identifying the genus and species of plants through their sexual organs, the reproductive parts of the plant were not illicit but necessary for determining important plant categories. They did not, therefore, present any potential distraction for the botanist. Rather, when it comes to identifying species, being “led astray” by the nonsexual or aesthetic characteristics of the plant—such as size, color, and scent—was the true danger for the botanist.10 Among all the distracting attributes of flora that Linnaeus identifies in his Critica Botanica, color particularly offends him. It can be dangerously seductive because nothing strikes our senses more through sight than colour: hence it is not strange that the eyes of many have been quite taken captive by it, not to say spellbound. In early times colour was accepted as a means of distinguishing species, and before long became used as a criterion of species … though anyone who is not blind can see that Mirabilis and Impatiens produce a hundred differently coloured flowers on the same plant.11 Since sight is so crucial to botanical categorization, a floral quality that captivates the eye serves as a distraction from a flower's sexual characteristics, which were more reliable indicators of distinct plant categories. According to Linnaeus, color is “strangely sportive” and therefore more likely to have variations not indicative of separate species. As a result, Linnaeus implored botanists to look for the more dependable floral qualities such as the “number, shape, position, and proportion” of the plant's anatomy.12Seeing botanically, however, involved more than just seeking out the right plant details. As Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison demonstrate in their study of the history of scientific objectivity, Linnaeus and the enlightenment naturalists sought to access an archetype of nature not located by the naked eye alone. Uncovering “truth-to-nature,” suggest Daston and Galison, was not tantamount to forfeiting sensory perception in favor of a blind adherence to Platonic forms; rather, these two approaches worked together. One must be a careful and diligent observer of numerous examples in order to conceive of a generalized or regularized form that “transcended” specific categories expressing “a never seen but nonetheless real plant archetype.” And one became a diligent observer by attending to the right parts of the plant and by employing four crucial skills—“selecting, comparing, judging, [and] generalizing.”13Seeing as a botanist involved the mental and the physical, the analytical and the concrete, the hidden and the exposed. Linnaeus employed this way of seeing to conceptualize the natural world and to establish standards for scientific botanical images used for plant identification. And while he primarily attempted to systematically categorize plants, his promotion of a disciplined form of botanical seeing shaped popular attitudes about self-control in relation to floral aesthetics in the early nineteenth century.14During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, illustrated instructional monographs designed to teach the art of d