A grandmother’s trove of Civil War photos goes to Library of Congress

Abraham Lincoln’s home in Springfield, Ill., draped in black-and-white mourning cloth, following his assassination. African American mothers holding their babies, likely the first generation born into freedom. A battlefield in the Virginia wilderness a year after the war, with trees stripped of bark by musket fire. Snapshots from the era of the Civil War, they are among hundreds of rare images gathered over four decades by an 87-year-old Texas grandmother. Now, partly through a family tragedy, they are the property of the Library of Congress.

The library announced Friday that it has acquired more than 500 stunning images from the collection of Robin Stanford of Houston. They depict a United States marked by the scourges of war, slavery and assassination.

And in some cases they show life before the war. One shot shows South Carolina slaves worshiping in a spartan, plantation church, in what may be the only prewar photograph of its kind.