By Mark Rutledge
and Ophelia Thornton
A century-old photo album that traveled from the nation’s eastern mountains to the Mid-West before spending decades in California has returned to Appalachia. The album now resides, for safekeeping and historical record, in Johnson City, Tennessee, which is represented in black and white on many of the pages of pictures.
The album’s owner, Harry Martin Creager Jr., was fresh home from fighting in France when he began documenting his life with a camera in 1919. A handsome young man in his 20s, he appears in many of the photographs apparently snapped by his camera. The pictures of mostly good quality follow his adventurous journey for more than 17 years before he and his wife, Anne, presumably settled in Southern California, where both are buried. Harry worked as an office clerk, and the image collection reflects an attention to detail. Viewing his photgraphs today can create a sense of being young when Model T cars were new, American flags flew 48 stars, and men wore neckties to baseball games — and pretty much everywhere else.
Part of an estate left by an unknown person in the 1980s, the album was rescued from among items to be discarded. After decades of being a conversation piece shrouded in mystery, the book of pictures was mailed to a Johnson City resident. The package was subsequently deposited with the Archives of Appalachia, where such historic items are preserved, studied and made available to the public. Harry, who died within a year of his wife some 60 years ago, expressed in many photographs his love of country and devotion to honoring veterans. Some details about his post-war life can now be told again. Others remain a mystery.
Finding Harry
The limited power of basic internet search engines has thus far left many of the album’s names and faces without further details. Some notable people have been identified. At least two pictured as small children went on to lead quite successful lives making remarkable contributions to society.
The album’s preservation has made it possible to search for the stories behind Harry’s photographs. Found during an estate clean-out in Santa Anna, California, the pictures, at a glance, reflect the workplaces and private life of a World War I veteran between 1919 and 1936. Early scenes depict nearly a decade inside and around what was then the Mountain Branch of the National Home for Disabled Volunteer Soldiers in Johnson City.
Now the James H. Quillen Veterans Affairs Medical Center at Mountain Home, campus facilities have grown considerably since the photographs were taken. Original buildings and other structures depicted during the 1920s appear largely the same today.
The album’s deteriorating, string-bound leather cover must be handled with care. The inside pages are well preserved. Corner-mounted snapshots depict people and places in New York, Tennessee, Virginia, California, Wisconsin, Ohio, Kentucky, and Louisiana. For someone living in the 1920s and ’30s, Harry covered a lot of ground. Automobiles represented include Model Ts, a late ’20s Dodge, and various vehicles from the 1930s. Buildings in 1920s downtown districts — many of which look mostly the same 85 to 100 years later — are just a few decades old in the photographs.
Jim McGeough of Corona, California, was tasked with clearing out a home in nearby Santa Anna where the album was discovered. How the person who left the album behind was connected to Harry is not known. With no surviving family to claim the album, McGeough sensed that the meticulously chronicled collection of photographs should be rescued. “He just saved it all those years,” Donna McGeough said of her husband’s decision to hold on to the album.
About four decades later, Donna McGeough was looking through the album’s images and decided the collection should have a safe and more permanent home. “We love history and old antique things,” she said, “so I knew I had to do something to preserve the album.”
Because Johnson City and the “Soldiers Home” are reflected early and extensively in the album, she determined that its long journey should circle back to East Tennessee. Now added to the collections at the Archives of Appalachia on the campus of East Tennessee State University, the album is a treasure trove of names and images with stories to reveal.
About the Archives
The Archives of Appalachia is available to the public for the purpose of sharing the rich history of the region. Artifacts often come from people who feel that their family heirlooms have a place in that history. The Archives is one of four units that comprize the Center of Excellence for Appalachian Studies and Services at ETSU.
The Archives also serves as a repository for memories — the written words, images, and sounds that document life in southern Appalachia. Holdings include two miles of rare manuscripts, 300,000 photographs, 100,000 audio and moving-image recordings, 15,000 books, and over 30 terabytes of digital materials. Nearly 2,000 patrons visit the Archives in person each year, and 65,000 more from over 50 countries engage with the collections online.
The holdings span a range of disciplines — from folk medicine to environmental studies, from history to women’s studies, and from linguistics to music, just to name a few. The Archives is open Monday through Friday from 9 a.m. until 4:30 p.m.
Home from war
The album opens to life in 1919 shortly after Harry Creager’s return to the United States from France at the end of World War 1. He apparently had contracted tuberculosis, which was a major post-war problem and the leading cause of disability discharge from the military. Many infected soldiers required lengthy medical treatment for the disease. The photographs reveal that Harry was a tuberculosis patient at a medical facility in New York between 1919 and 1921.
He moved to Johnson City in 1921 and was employed as a clerk in the Soldiers Home commissary. Documented in photographs are the grounds, facilities, staff, officers, patients, and patriotic parades within the grounds of the medical facility as well as in town. He began courting a young lady in Johnson City and they later married. The couple lived in Johnson City, where they spent time with friends and visited nearby historic sights. They also took recreational trips to rural communities in the mountains of Western North Carolina.
In 1930, they visited southern California. Most of the trip was spent in Irvine, the city with the highest number of labels under mostly missing photographs from the visit. The time spent in California precedes the couple’s move that year to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where similar photographs document life and facilities at the expansive and earlier-established Milwaukee Soldiers Home. They apparently lived in Milwaukee at least until 1936, which is where the album’s pages end. Throughout that period, however, they often visited Johnson City and other parts of Tennessee, with shorter stays in California, Kentucky, Ohio, and Louisiana represented in pictures.
When Harry met Anne
Aside from being a war veteran and active in the American Legion, Harry was a photographer who often carried a camera around the areas where he lived and worked. Although he wrote the year and brief identifiers below each photograph and on the backs, he did not identify every person with a first and last name, including himself. Throughout the album, he is labeled only as “H.M.C.” and his wife simply as “Anne.”
Initial research by the Archives of Appalachia revealed the couple to be Harry Martin Creager Jr. (1893-1964) and Anne Laura Saylor Creager (1904-1965). Harry arrives in Johnson City in 1921, and Anne first appears on page 15 of the digitized album in photos dated 1923. She would have been no older than 19, and Harry about 30. Six of seven pictures on the page are of Anne — sitting in a grassy spot, by a lake, beside a tree, and with what appears to be an early 1920s Ford Model T. Taken during the same outing, the photos on this page likely represent the courtship that led to their marriage in 1925. Not much has been revealed about Anne except that she was from Tennessee. Harry was born in Cincinnati, Ohio. (He was previously married, in 1917, to Pearl Katherine Conner Mahon, 1898-1988). Harry and Anne are buried in the same plot (Section A-C, Site 250) at Fort Rosecrans National Cemetery in San Diego, California. That information is on record at the U.S. Veterans Affairs Office. Whether they had children is not known. Although several children are depicted in the album, none belonged to the Creagers.
Service memorialized
Harry and Anne lived in Milwaukee at least until 1936. They presumably moved to California at some point and remained there until their deaths. Allen Jackson, historian for the East Tennessee Veteran’s Memorial Association and Tri-Cities (Tennessee) Military Affairs Council, provided more details about Harry’s life and military service:
He was a World War I veteran, having served in the U.S. Army’s Battery F of the 136th Field Artillery Regiment, 37th Division, out of Cincinnati.
After Harry arrived at the “Soldiers Home” in Johnson City in 1921, he became a member of the American Legion Post 156 at Mountain Home.
He was admitted as a patient at the National Sanitarium at Mountain Home in 1922.
Harry and his first wife divorced in 1924, and he married Anne Saylor the next year.
Those bits of information, and an article published in May 2024 by Cincinnati NPR station WVXU, help to join some other dots leading up to the start of the photo album in 1919. The earliest images are from the Metropolitan Sanitarium at Mount McGregor, New York. The facility was owned by the Metropolitan Life Insurance company for treating its employees suffering from tuberculosis. Harry landed there soon after returning to the United States on March 24, 1919, with the 37th Division following its combat mission in France.
Tuberculosis likely played a role in Harry’s move to Johnson City. According to a federal report on the history of the Veterans Affairs Medical Center at Mountain Home in Johnson City, the needs of World War I veterans with tuberculosis led to medical care becoming the most prominent aspect of services for veterans. “From 1920-1926, the Mountain Branch (opened in 1904) was redesignated the National Sanitarium,” the report says, “a facility dedicated to the rehabilitation of young veterans of the Great War who suffered from tuberculosis.” Patients at the facility in Johnson City reclined on wide porches that were added so that the mountain air could be utilized as part of treatment plans. The same was true at the Metropolitan Sanitarium in New York. The album contains photos of patients (including Creager) on porches at both facilities.
Deployed on June 28, 1918, the 37th Division had been overseas only a few months before the Armistice agreement ended the war on Nov. 11, 1919. The 37th spent less than a month actually engaged in battle, having fired its first shots at enemy forces on Oct. 17. Despite the division’s short time in battle, a monument to Battery F 136th Field Artillery was erected in the form of a large bronze plaque affixed to a stone wall at Twin Lakes in Cincinnati’s Eden Park. Established by “The Mothers,” the monument was dedicated in October 1925. Among the names of soldiers listed alphabetically in bronze relief is “Harry M. Creager.”
According to the 37th’s timeline, its members left Cincinnati in early September of 1917 for training at Camp Sheridan, Alabama. Harry and his first wife were married that same year. The Cincinnati war memorial was dedicated eight years later in 1925, when Harry and Anne were married and living in Johnson City. The album has photos from a visit they made to the Cincinnati Zoo that year, but none to indicate they had been present for the dedication or visited the memorial site.
Notable people, places
Harry Creager photographed everyone from friends and their children to sanitarium staff, administrators, and visiting dignitaries.
Frederick William Galbraith Jr. is pictured on page 17 of the album’s digital version standing outside what is presumably a building on the Mountain Home campus with several other men. The photo is dated 1921. He was the second national commander of the American Legion. A decorated veteran of World War I, he is credited with helping to make the American Legion the country’s most powerful association for war veterans. Galbraith was enormously popular, having been a successful sailor and businessman before joining the First Infantry Regiment, Ohio National Guard, at the start of World War I. A war memorial dedicated to him (The Galbraith Memorial) also stands at Eden Park in Cincinnati. Not long after the Creager photograph was taken, Galbraith was killed in a car crash, June 9, 1921, in Indianapolis, Indiana. Thousands reportedly attended his funeral in Cincinnatti.
George Berry (page 33) appears in a portrait photograph clipped from a publication and dated 1924. He was already president of the International Printing Pressmen and Assistants’ Union of North America (an office he held until his death in 1948). A native of Rogersville, Tennessee, he served as a U.S. Senator for less than two years, appointed by Tennessee Gov. Gordon Browning to serve the remaining term of Sen. Nathan L. Backman, who died in office.
Little Bohemia Resort, Manitowish, Wisconsin (page 119). Harry and Anne visited in 1935, a year after a shootout occurred at the resort lodge when the FBI was tipped that John Dillinger and his notorious gang was spending a weekend there. On a Wikipedia page about the FBI raid, there is a 1934 photograph of the front of the lodge that looks similar to the one from Harry and Anne’s visit.
Col. Vesey Walker (page 123) was leader of the Milwaukee American Legion band at the time of the photograph. He would be chosen by Walt Disney to lead his Disneyland Band on opening day in 1955, and for a two-week run afterward. He stayed on and remained leader of the Disneyland Band until his retirement in 1970.
Raymod Heacock (page 75) is pictured as a 2-year-old in Irvine, California,
in 1930. His sisters, Patsy and Betty, are pictured on page 123. Heacock became an engineer and is well known for his long career with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He died in 2016 in La Crescenta, California. According to an obituary in the Los Angeles Times, he contributed to some of the most notable space probes during his career, including the Mariner missions to Mars, Venus and Mercury, and the Hubble Space Telescope. “However, he is best known for his work on the ambitious Voyager mission,” the obituary says, “which explored the outer planets of the solar system as well as their moons, and is still sending back data from the edge of the solar system today.”
Lillian Mori
The relationship of Harry and Anne Creager to most children who appear in the album is not certain. Some of the children obviously belong to close friends of the Creager’s. Lillian Mori, who first appears on page 57 (dated 1926) as a toddler on her mother’s lap, was the oldest of two children belonging to Carrie and Guido Micharel Mori, who was the music director and band leader at the Soldiers Home. According to a 1975 obituary in the Johnson City Press, Guido Mori was a native of Milan Italy and emigrated to the United States in the early 1900s. He enlisted in the armed forces during World War I, serving as a band director. “After the war, he came to live in Johnson City and became director of musical entertainment at the Mountain Home VA Center,” the obituary said.
Like so many names typed into internet search engines, “Lillian Mori” produces a wide field of possibilities. Pair the name with “Johnson City,” and the life story of the little girl in Harry’s black and white pictures begins to unfold from her obituary.
Lillian Mori Clarke Giberga died in 2010 at age 85. She “was born in Johnson City, Tennessee, on March 29, 1925, into a musical family,” the obituary reads. “Her Italian-born father was a musician who nurtured her love of the piano and singing. Gifted with a vibrant and melodious voice, she received a scholarship to the Peabody Conservatory of Music. As a first-year student, she distinguished herself by winning the Rhea Hunter Award as the dramatic soprano of the year in 1943.”
Lillian graduated from Science Hill High School in Johnson City in 1943 and appears in a reunion program, found online, from the 1970s. She was married twice — first to Alan Thomas “Lefty” Clarke, a breeder of thoroughbred horses and former professional baseball player. They raised five daughters on a farm in Clarksville, Maryland.
In 1962, Lillian married Manuel Giberga, a Cuban refugee and economist who was a prominent leader of the Cuban community in the United States. Living in Washington, D.C., Giberga served in various government positions before being named by President Richard Nixon in 1969 as a member of the Cabinet Committee on Opportunities for Spanish-Speaking Peoples. According to an obituary in the Johnson City Press, Giberga died at age 57 in 1974 while serving as a special consultant to the Department of Justice concerning drug-enforcement issues related to the Cuban community in the United States.
Following her husband’s death, Lillian was appointed to represent exiled Cubans in Washington. Among her papers filed with the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library is a letter of recommendation for that appointment from Democratic Congressman Thomas “Tip” O’Neill of Massachusetts dated July 24, 1975. O’Neill was House Majority Leader at the time.
Before she went out into the world to raise a family and serve in important governmental positions, Lillian’s young life in Johnson City was documented in the local newspaper. The society pages recorded several luncheons and other events at the Mori home on Lamont Street — which appears much the same today. Lillian often entertained guests there with a song.
Reached at her home in Savanah, Georgia, Lillian’s daughter Lilibet Clarke said her mother was the family archivist and took lots of pictures of her daughters growing up on the Maryland horse farm. It’s obvious that the Creagers were close friends to Clarke’s grandparents, but she had no knowledge of them.
After viewing the digital version of the Creager photo album, Clarke said she had never seen those particular childhood photos of her mother, uncle and grandparents.
“It’s crazy, because I’ve had this on my mind,” Clarke said, referring to the task of sorting through photographs and other items that her mother left behind. “This must be a sign. I’m shocked and honored. Mother would be too.”
More to tell
Harry Creager’s photo album appears to be a collection of family snapshots that includes official photographs documenting staff, administrators and veterans at soldiers homes in Tennessee and Wisconsin. Groups of general laborers, medical staff, and high-ranking officials obviously took time away from work to pose for Harry’s camera. It’s possible that photography was among his duties as a commissary clerk. Perhaps he simply mixed his work-related photos among personal images in this album. According to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, film development was among the many products and services offered by canteens and commissaries at soldiers homes.
Whatever the motivation, scenes and images captured in the album provide a sense of how people lived in Appalachia and beyond during the years after the first world war. One aspect of how people lived in and around National Soldiers Homes is represented in the album by omission. The Mountain Branch included a segregated ward for African American veterans, which is documented in other photographs from the 1920s. No such images exist in Harry’s album. Still, the many lives, scenes, and events represented are compelling.
In a 2011 interview with LesPhotographes.com, author Barbara Lavine, a photo album collector and curator specializing in vernacular photography, is asked how the photo album changes the perception and reading of snapshots. “The photo album is by nature a flow of images that create a narrative,” Lavine said. “Photos are arranged on a page, and by turning pages the viewer activates the story.”
More people and places inside the pages of Harry Creager’s photo album have stories waiting to be told. With the album archived and accessible to the public, others can look through its pages from the past and perhaps uncover more of the narrative the pictures create.
Mark Rutledge is managing editor of Appalachian Places. Ophelia Thornton is a student in the Master’s in Appalachian Studies program at East Tennessee State University, and an assistant editor for Appalachian Places. She holds a master’s degree in Secondary English Education and has taught history in Tennessee public schools.