This public domain image shows one of the Vanderbilt summer cottages, Biltmore House, now a National Historic Monument located near Asheville, North Carolina. It is still owned by Vanderbilt descendants. Modeled on the French chateaux styles, it is the largest private residence in the U.S. Construction began in 1888 and was completed in 1895. This image shows how it looked in the year 1900. The architect was Richard Morris Hunt, and the grounds were designed by Frederick Law Olmsted.

This photo was taken by John H Tarbell of Asheville. Most of the photo credits we have seen for this photographer are from 1895 to 1905, though he was listed in the 1910 census as a photographer, living in Boston by that time. In the 1900 census he is shown in Asheville, age 50, born September 1849 in Massachusetts.

This dramatic image of Rancho de Taos Mission in New Mexico shows how artistic the black and white photograph can be in the hands of an experienced photographer. The tonal range is excellent with the darkest black shadows on the left, and purest white reflection on the corner toward the right, and every shade of gray in-between.

The photographer for this public domain image was Laura Gilpin (1891-1979), well-known for her anthropologically oriented photographs of the southwestern states and Mexico. It was published/copyrighted in 1930, and the copyright was allowed to lapse when it was up for renewal in 1956, before the copyright law was amended to give longer protection. (Images as late as 1963 may be in the public domain, if they were copyrighted and published, but the copyright was not renewed). Laura Gilpin studied photography at the Clarence H White school in New York city, and published several books of photographs. In one, she wrote:

Many enter the field of photography with the impulse to record a scene. They often fail to realize that what they wish to do is to record the emotion felt upon viewing that scene.

This image is labeled by the photographer ‘Les maisons de Médenine‘ which is French for ‘houses of Medenine’. While modern Ghorfas were shown as housing for slaves in the film Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, in reality these were built for storing grain, not as residences. Medenine is a town in southern Tunisia.

The photographer for this public domain image was F. Soler, a Tunisian photographer active in the late 1800s and early 1900s. His portraits and landscape images of the people and places of Tunisia are quite common, especially in post-card format, but little is known about the photographer himself.

One of four sites chosen to be the first National Monuments in the United States in 1906, Montezuma’s Castle was built by the Sinagua people, who were related to the better-known Hohokam. This cliff house was built about 1100 A.D. and occupied for four hundred years. The main structure was five stories high. Obviously, you don’t build your home that high on a cliff-side unless you need a defensive position, an that was the case here, with conflicts between local groups over access to water and food resources. The population peaked about 1325 A.D. There was an even larger pueblo at the foot of the cliff, but it is not so well preserved.

This public domain photograph is another image by Dr. Edgar Alexander Mearns (1856-1916), whom we profiled under his image of Emma and Mex. This further confirms a date of 1887 for that image, as this one is dated that same year and notes it is just “3 miles from Fort Verde”.

This is an image of Carnegie Public Library, Fort Worth, Texas. There were over 1,600 Carnegie libraries built in the United States and almost 1,000 more in other countries between 1883 and 1929, financed by Scottish-American businessman Andrew Carnegie. Curiously, most of them had an imposing set of stairs leading up to the main doors, to symbolize how users were elevating themselves.

The Fort Worth Carnegie Library was designed by Herbert H Green. Funding was approved in 1899, and the library opened in 1901. This photograph was probably taken soon after it was completed, the landscaping does not look very long-established. The photograph is credited to Charlie L Schwartz, but I could not find any information on him. There are several Charles or Charlie Schwartz’s in Texas in the 1900 census, but none of them are listed as photographers. This very substantial-looking building was razed in 1937 — one wonders why?