Smokies Special
Roger Hoffman Howell (1897-1962) was raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. In the mid-1930s, he came to Knoxville, Tennessee, to work as an engineering draftsman for the newly commissioned Tennessee Valley Authority.
Status
PermanentGallery
Julia Dossett Webb Outdoor GalleryHowell’s personality can be seen in the photographs he took while hiking in Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Shot between 1935 and 1941, Howell’s images are simultaneously light-hearted (He loved the mountains and met his future wife, Alice Lynn, while in the Smoky Mountain Hiking Club) yet scientific (many photographs document trails, vistas, flora, etc., all carefully labeled).
In 1984, Alice Lynn Howell (1910-2011) donated her husband’s 1,733 black-and-white negatives and 400 Kodachrome slides to the Calvin M. McClung Historical Collection, Knox County Public Library. Today, these photographs provide intimate-and, in some cases, among the earliest color-views of the national park during its first decade of existence.
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