PA Photos and Documents

Welcome to the Elizabethtown College: Historic Images Collection, a part of the POWER Library: PA Photos and Documents.

This collection consists of ca. 3000 mostly black and white photographs documenting the history of Elizabethtown College from its founding. The College was founded by the Church of the Brethren in 1899 and as been an important institution in the area since that time. In the early years, the people depicted were often not only imporatnt to the College’s history, but they were also noted figures in the Church of the Brethren, an important religios group in the history of Eastern Pennsylvania.

The Brethren movement migrated to Germantown, Pennsylvania in 1710. The movement spread westward and southward over the next 200 years. There is an especially strong concentration of people associated with the Church of the Brethren in Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, Ohio and Indiana.