From the Archives

The Diana Mara Henry One Room Schools and Schoolteachers Collection

Vermont Folklife is excited to announce the acquisition of a new collection for our archive, the Diana Mara Henry One Room Schools and Schoolteachers Collection. Diana Mara Henry is a Vermont-based photographer and photojournalist who, over a career spanning more than 50 years, has created a significant body of photographic work on topics including antiwar activism, political campaigns, and the Women’s Movement of the 1970s and 80s, among many other subjects.

In the early 1980s, Henry collaborated with Middlebury College Sociology professor Margaret “Peggy” Nelson on a project to document the last, active one room schools in Vermont, their teachers and students. This February, Henry’s one room schools project collection—consisting of 65 black and white silver gelatin prints, 29 black and white Polaroid instant prints, photographic negatives and contact sheets, posters, and manuscript and print materials—came to Vermont Folklife.

Henry’s one room school photos have long been familiar to us. In 2014, Vermont Folklife partnered with Henry and Nelson to stage an exhibit drawn from their collaboration, One Room Schools. The One Room Schools exhibit featured Henry’s photographs alongside text by Nelson, and audio excerpts from Nelson’s 1980s interviews with teachers in Vermont’s one room schools. As a part of the One Room Schools exhibit project, Nelson donated her audio field recordings to the Vermont Folklife Archive, and we are thrilled that Henry’s photographs have joined our collection as well!