The Willard Stewart WPA and HABS Photographs of Delaware Collection contains 246 photographs of landscapes and buildings in Delaware taken by the prominent Wilmington, Delaware photographer, Willard S. Stewart (1915-2003). During the 1930s, he became the primary photographer for the Delaware Federal Writers Project, part of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), and photographed numerous Delaware buildings and landscapes. Many of these images were published in New Castle on the Delaware (1936) and Delaware: A Guide to the First State (1938), both of which were published by the Delaware Federal Writers' Project. Willard Stewart was also a project photographer for the Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS). HABS was established in 1933 by the National Park Service, United States Department of the Interior. Like the Federal Writers Project under the WPA, HABS was created to give work to unemployed draftsmen, architects, and photographers. The collection includes images from throughout Delaware, although the greatest number are from New Castle County, with the architecture of New Castle and Wilmington being extremely well represented. In addition to historic buildings, Stewart also documented businesses, factories, farms, waterscapes, and undeveloped land. Most of the photographs are undated. The two that are have dates of 1936 and 1938, which suggests that the rest of the photographs also date to around these years, as does the fact that some of the images appear in WPA publications that came out also in 1936 and 1938. All of the images are black and white gelatin silver prints.

Viewing the Collection

Use the links above to Search the collection in ContentDM, or use the Browse links above to access the photographs via lists of selected index terms. In ContentDM, Click the Browse link in the menu bar to view all the photographs in the collection. To view all the photographs in the same order as listed in the online finding aid, change your Preferences to sort by the Identifier field.