About - The Collection
The E.B. Green Digital Collection represents a small portion of the James, Meadows, & Howard (formerly Green & Wicks) architectural firm records housed at the Buffalo and Erie County Historical Society Research Library. Two of the oldest and most fragile items in the collection are ledgers, the first dating from around 1892 and 1901. The ledgers document the daily work of a busy architectural firm including information on clients, plans, and cost estimates. Because of the ledger's historical significance and frail condition, they were chosen as the primary items to be digitized for this project. Currently, the first ledger has been digitized.
Each ledger is approximately 300 pages, organized in roughly chronological order. In addition to the information and drawings written in the books, many entries contain additional paste-ins of tracing paper with pen and ink floor plans. In digitizing the pages, photographs were taken of each page as viewed flat, with the various layers of paper lifted and photographed as needed, so that all of the information in the ledger is available to be viewed in the collection. Data captured from the ledger pages includes client names, contractor names, cost estimates for various parts of the jobs, addresses, building descriptions, and dates.
As mentioned above, the ledgers are only a fraction of the James, Meadows & Howard records. Other records in the archival collection, available at the BECHS Research Library, include construction specification books, bids, contracts, plans and blueprints, correspondence, invoices, and site photographs. The records range in date from around 1892 when the firm was Green & Wicks, to the end of the James, Meadows & Howard firm in 1971. Unfortunately, there are no surviving records of the firm's earliest work, which began in 188l. Also, although the firm did have commissions outside of New York's Erie and Niagara counties, those records are not in this collection. Please see the Resources page for more specific information about the full collection and other architectural records at the BECHS Library.
