Scrapbook, 1873-1940

The Mrs. Louise F. Holmes scrapbook collection contains one scrapbook that documents Mrs. Holmes's broad range of other interests which reflect the life of African Americans in the Lowcountry and South Carolina. This collection contains newspaper clippings, photographs, correspondence, and memorabilia that follow the lives of the Holmes family. Mrs. Holmes worked as a teacher at the Wilson School in Florence, S.C. and was the daughter of the poet, Mary Weston Fordham. Featured prominently in the scrapbook are Dr. William Francis Holmes, her husband, who was an educator, doctor, and an activist with the Florence Branch of the NAACP; James H. Fordham, an African American police officer in Charleston at the end of the nineteenth century; Jennie Bonneau Weston, an African American school teacher who taught for fifty-one consecutive years in Charleston County and served as principal of the State Orphan Asylum; and Thomas E. Miller, the Reconstruction era politican and the first president of South Carolina State University. Other Fordham family members are also documented in the scrapbook including Louise B. Fordham, Mary Weston Fordham, and Edward Fordham.

Her interest in poetry is evident throughout the scrapbook with newspaper clippings of published poems and correspondence to Mary Weston Fordham from Stewart L. Woodford about the release of Magnolia Leaves and a letter to Mrs. Holmes from Edgar A. Guest about a suggestion Mrs. Holmes had made for a poem.