Through the Glass: A Window into the Past

Until a couple years ago, the existence or whereabouts of Northwest Missouri State University hadn’t crossed Mary Sullivan’s mind. She knows it now as the result of a serendipitous discovery she made three decades ago.

The year was 1995. Mary Sullivan and her brother were aware of a crumbling barn in Iowa City, not far from the University of Iowa campus. Streets capped with cul-de-sacs and sprawling houses were sprouting up around the old farm property where the barn still stood. The elderly property owner gave the siblings permission to salvage the barn wood and take whatever they wanted from inside the structure.

As Sullivan surveyed the inside of the decrepit barn, her eyes shifted to an area where streams of sunlight were pushing through gaps in the siding. Amid the piles of household odds and ends and debris, she spotted a large wooden humpback chest and a set of wood crates. They were covered with decades of grit and dust.

“I could see that they were just jam-packed with all these, like, pieces of glass,” Sullivan said, estimating each piece to be 4 inches long and 5 inches wide. “And then I figured out what they were – that they were glass plate negatives. And so I went to the man who owned the farm and asked about these things. And he again said, ‘Take whatever you want. I don’t care. I’m not doing anything with them.’ And he didn’t seem to know too much about them.”

She didn’t know it then, but Sullivan had uncovered an expansive collection of glass plate negatives that are now more than 100 years old and a priceless documentation of Northwest’s early history.

Sullivan loaded the crates into her brother’s vehicle with the barn wood they collected and took them to her parents’ home in Cedar Rapids for further inspection, beginning a 30-year odyssey that led to the glass plates’ return to the Northwest campus.

“I do remember my immediate instinct was ‘save these. These can’t be allowed to just sit here and rot away,’” Sullivan said.

Time passes

As years passed, Sullivan held onto the crates without much of a goal for them. After all, she was busy with other pursuits, including an acting career in Los Angeles.

In the mid-1980s, Sullivan moved to New York for an internship and eventually landed the part of a young Irish girl in an off-Broadway production. In 1987, she married and moved with her actor-husband to Los Angeles, where she was quickly cast in a movie with Diane Keaton, “Baby Boom.” She appeared in a share of television commercials, too, for brands such as Nikon, the Los Angeles Times, Hallmark and Mrs. Smith’s apple pies.

But after 20-some years of professional acting, Sullivan tired of Hollywood and was ready to return to Iowa. She wanted to pursue teaching while being close to her family.

In 2008, after completing her bachelor’s degree in English at Cal State Northridge, she moved back to Iowa, launched her second career as a teacher and got involved in community theater. Today, she teaches acting classes at Kirkwood Community College in Cedar Rapids.

“I wasn’t the blonde bombshell starlet type, so there were fewer parts,” she said. “I had a good time, and I made friends there, and I did some art that I was proud of, but it was also always a struggle and not much for the networking, the glad-handing and the consistent self-promotion.”

‘History comes alive’

By 2025, the crates of glass plate negatives had been moved multiple times with her parents and then to a home Sullivan and her husband purchased. Some of the crates went to the basement. Some went to the attic. Others went to a guest room.

Still, the origins of the glass plate negatives were beginning to weigh on her mind. She was keenly aware of the history preserved on each plate and curious about where so many of the images were taken. Among the limited clues, “John E. Cameron, Iowa City, Iowa,” was scrawled on the side of one of the crates.

“I just knew they were a one-of-a-kind, irreplaceable, incredibly valuable artifact from history,” said Sullivan, who dabbled in photography and printed some contact sheets from the negatives in a darkroom she set up in her parents’ basement.”

Then, during a holiday gathering, Sullivan sat with her niece and showed some of the prints she made from the glass plates. On one of the photos, Sullivan’s niece pointed to a billboard-style sign in a field that included the words “Northwest Missouri Normal School.”

“She just Googled it up, and she said, ‘Oh, it’s not called that anymore, now it’s Northwest Missouri State University,’” Sullivan recalled.

After years of seeing the majestic Administration Building only through those glass plates, Sullivan had a new cause. The revelation led her to contact the Northwest Special Collections and Archives.

Cameron’s photos return to Northwest

Jessica Schmidt Vest ’07, the head of archives and special collections at Northwest, was incredulous when she received the first call from Sullivan last year.

“We were not quite sure exactly what she had captured because we didn’t really have a record of John Cameron as a faculty member at the Fifth District Normal School,” Vest said. “Once we got further into our discussion with Mary Sullivan, we realized that this was kind of a lost treasure that we would have loved to have had, obviously decades ago, but we were thrilled to get it back into our collection.”

The collection is unique both in its format and breadth. Until receiving Cameron’s photos, Northwest had in its archives less than 50 glass plate negatives, which were produced from the 1870s until about the 1920s.

Other portrayals of life at Northwest during the years after its founding in 1905 are sparse. The first campus newspaper, The Green and White Courier, began publishing in 1914, and The Northwest Missourian was established in 1926. The Tower yearbook didn’t begin documenting campus life until 1917.

Vest estimates Northwest held around 200 images of the campus taken before 1925, nearly all of which are printed photographs. Most of the pictures captured of campus during the era were created by professional photographers who visited for the purpose of selling postcards, brochures and other printed products.

The Cameron photos add viewpoints and slices of campus life not seen in other photographs from the same era. In addition to candid photos of students, he captured nature scenes to supplement his teaching and presentations.

“He’s not setting up overly staged portrait photography,” Vest said, noting the equipment he would have used was clunky and fragile. “He’s just kind of taking photographs of students, his family members, maybe other faculty and staff on campus as the time happens. They’re not all posed and smiling. Some people look kind of annoyed in the photographs. Some people look happy, and you can tell they’re kind of goofing around, and that’s kind of rare for this era of photography.”

The life of John Cameron

Based on research conducted by Vest and her team of students, John Cameron was born in Ohio in 1868 and was educated in Iowa after his family moved near Cedar Rapids. His father was a Civil War veteran for the Union and later became a farmer.

Eventually, Cameron became a high school teacher and relocated to Kansas City, Missouri. Around the turn of the century, he was traveling extensively, speaking publicly and practicing photography. Then, in 1910, he was hired by the Fifth District Normal School in Maryville to teach agriculture, though he also was considered an expert in physics, botany and zoology.

“He had really a wide range of educational background and expertise,” Vest said. “He teaches here for five years and really expands the institution’s agriculture science program.”

Cameron departed the Normal School for a faculty position at the University of Iowa. In the years after leaving Maryville, news coverage of his speaking engagements dwindled. A death certificate indicates he died at age 54 in 1922 from Parkinson’s disease.

“When we got this collection, one of the things we realized is that there were a ton of unused glass plate negatives,” Vest said. “So it’s possible his illness later in life did not allow him to use the rest of those glass plate negatives.”

Preserving a lost art form

It’s up to anyone’s imagination to say how long the wooden crates with Cameron’s photos may have been buried inside the barn and exposed to outdoor elements before Sullivan found them.

When Vest received them, they were chock-full of remnants from mice and other rodents. Some of the glass plates were stuck together from being exposed to moisture and humidity. Environmental conditions had degraded the photographic emulsion on the plates, making the images appear as if someone had spilled a jar of black ink on them. 

“Obviously, we can’t stop the deterioration that happened for their first, maybe close to 100 years, but the next 100, we can at least keep them in the most ideal possible conditions here at the University,” Vest said.

Vest says a lot can be gleaned from Cameron’s photos about Northwest’s early history, particularly in relation to the teaching of agricultural and natural sciences. The collection also includes images Cameron captured of bird species and crops in addition to landscapes from Kansas City to Yellowstone National Park. In all, the collection contains more than 500 photos.

Once digitizing and inventorying the collection is complete, Vest says it has great potential for scholarly researchers and historians as well as alumni and friends of Northwest who take joy in seeing new perspectives of the campus.

To Sullivan, the photos are works of art.

“It’s not an AI image,” she said. “It’s the actual plate that was taken on that day over 100 years ago. It’s an actual artifact, and it’s a real window into the past.”

After meeting with Vest at the B.D. Owens Library for the first time last summer, Sullivan walked to the center of the Northwest campus and gazed at the front of the Administration Building with its castle-like turrets, which she had only seen before that moment in the scenes captured through Cameron’s camera lens. In Cameron’s photographs, almost nothing but tall grass surrounds the Administration Building.

“From the photographs, it always kind of struck me how the building was intended to have this showy impression but also with it just standing alone out in the middle of empty fields,” Sullivan said. “To come on campus and see all the sidewalks and the grass and the big trees and the other buildings, it was a little bit of a time travel kind of experience.”

Sullivan is grateful the glass plate negatives are resting now at a place where they can be preserved and shared. The barn where she discovered the glass plates is gone now, with only an overgrown concrete pad in its place.

“It would break my heart to think of them still being there,” Sullivan said. “I’m a person who likes curiosities and odd things, and I know enough about photography to know what those things were and to have some sense of the value of them and the sense of them being rare and potentially important.”

Click the slideshow below to view a selection of photos from Cameron's collection.