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EDEN — For decades in Eden, studio photographers quietly went about their work, coaxing babies to smile, veiled brides to tilt their chins, and fresh high school graduates in mortar boards to strike dignified poses.

When they weren’t taking studio portraits, they shot images of club members, football teams, piano recitals, parades or some of the latest products stitched and woven at the textile mills.

And, in the first half of the 20th century, they went to accident scenes to shoot images for the police or dropped by the funeral home to photograph a body for a grieving family.

Those works — which span more than 80 years — soon will be available to the public. Bonita Francis, wife of long-time Eden photographer Harold Francis, who died in 2004 at age 82, has donated his collection of prints and negatives to the Eden Historical Museum.

Museum volunteers, led by Billy Phillips, are organizing more than 100,000 images, mostly negatives. In the coming weeks, the museum group, which is part of the Eden Preservation Society, will launch a campaign to cover the expenses of digitizing the photos.

That’s the only way to ensure the photos will be preserved, says Phillips. It also will allow them to create an online home for the photos, probably linked to a museum Web site. 

And, they need you — people who can browse through the photos and see what they’ve been seeing: wedding parties lined up on church steps, brides and grooms sipping punch, parades down Washington Street, snapshots of carding machines and mounds of cotton on the mill floor, and accident photos documenting events such as the day in the 1960s when a train, barreling through Leaksville, hit an oil tanker truck on the tracks, causing an explosion that left several dead.

Phillips is hoping that when people have access to the photos, they’ll start recognizing the faces in the pictures, helping the museum officials identify those pictured and tell their stories.

In the meantime, Phillips and his wife, Vivian, slip on gloves to protect the negatives, and painstakingly go through the boxes, alphabetizing and labeling images.

Board member Julie Ganis is organizing, by subject, the prints, placing them in thick notebooks. She’s filled more than a dozen already.

“Essentially we’re seeing a community over the period of 80 years,” says Billy Phillips.

Though Francis was in business for about 50 years, he inherited the photos taken by his predecessors and associates.

At one time, there were three photography studios in town. Jean Harrington, the museum president, recalls an early photographer whom people called “Picture Price.” They have a portrait of him.

But it’s the works of Red Adams, Claude Gillie and Francis, to which most of the collection is attributed.

Bonita Francis says her husband  started working for Gillie after he came back from World War II.  He opened his own studio on Washington Street in the early 1970s.

When Adams and Gillie closed their businesses, Harold Francis ended up with their photos and negatives.

“Harold always had at least one camera with him anywhere he went,” says his wife .

He loved history, she says. When someone wanted an old photo copied, he’d ask to make a copy for himself. That’s why Phillips is finding some photos in the collection that date to the turn of the 20th century.

And then there are the surprises that turn up as  the negatives are placed on the  lighted viewing panel.

Vivian Phillips spotted an old friend, former Rockingham County Commissioner Wink Hoover, in his high school football uniform. She came across one of her grandmother posing in a toga. 

Harrington found a print of her uncle and a friend dressed in attire for a “tacky party” — something she says was all the rage in the 1930s.

Francis closed his shop in 2000, leaving the images in file drawers and boxes piled almost to the ceiling. 

A section of the museum, which is on Washington Street, has been set aside to house the collection, as well as some of his vintage cameras. It’ll be known as the Harold Francis Photographic Collection. The negatives and printed images will be available to the public. 

But the real key is digitizing the photos, says Phillips, who estimates it will cost at least $10,000.

“These photos document everything that happens in a community,” says Phillips. “We’ve got to preserve and make this available.”

Contact Myla Barnhardt at 627-1781 ext. 116 or myla.barnhardt@news-record.com.