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MSS 16892, Holsinger Studio portrait on Rotunda steps, Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia Library.
This collection is minimally processed and open for research.
This collection contains a single black-and-white photograph of young men and women formally dressed and posed on the University of Virginia Rotunda steps. The men are likely UVa students and faculty. The photograph is dated about 1896 and has a Holsinger, Charlottesville stamp on the left corner. Scaffolding is in the photograph's background, erected during the Rotunda restoration efforts. The exposed fluted columns of the Rotunda's front facade lack plaster in this scene, a result of the intense heat of the 1895 fire.
On October 27, 1895, a fire destroyed much of the Rotunda and completely leveled the building's sizable annex that housed classroom space, lecture halls, laboratories, and faculty offices. The University commissioned Cabell, Cocke, and Rouss Hall after the fire, all designed by McKim, Mead, and White. These buildings were completed in 1898 and housed facilities once within the destroyed Rotunda annex. The Rotunda was restored to its original form as a library without an elongated annex, an effort completed shortly after the turn of the twentieth century.
Sources "Rotunda - Cvillepedia." Accessed May 28, 2025. https://www.cvillepedia.org/Rotunda. "Rotunda: History." University of Virginia, n.d. https://rotunda.virginia.edu/history.
Rufus W. Holsinger (1866-1930), a photographer, relocated to Charlottesville from Bedford, Pennsylvania in the late 1880s. He opened the Holsinger University Studio on West Main Street for over four decades. Holsinger worked in the city as a studio and field photographer, capturing Charlottesville residents and many notable historic events of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His work included everything from the 1895 fire that destroyed the University of Virginia Rotunda to celebrations in Charlottesville marking the end of World War I. Holsinger died in Charlottesville in 1930.
Sources
Virginia Magazine. "Holsinger's Charlottesville." Accessed May 01, 2025. https://uvamagazine.org/articles/holsingers_charlottesville.
This collection was a gift from The Valentine to the Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia on 3 October 2022.