Historic American Buildings Survey

The Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS) is an architectural preservation endeavor by the United States Library of Congress. HABS partners large format film photographers with local architectural firms to produce archival quality 4x5 negatives and measured drawings of historically significant American constructions. Serving as the photographer on  HABS projects at Stennis Space Center,  Mississippi in 2014, Fort Pike, LA in 2014 and the Old Galilee Missionary Baptist Church, Shreveport, LA 2019, I photographed and hand processed negatives and prints to meet the 500 year archival standard the Library of Congress requires.


Old Galilee Missionary Baptist Church - Shreveport, LA

Dr. Martin Luther King spoke at the Old Galilee Missionary Baptist Church during the Civil Rights Movement on August 14, 1958. Listen to “The Speech at Galilee” in its entirety here.


Stennis Space Center & Fort Pike


About the HABS & HAER Programs:

The Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS) and the Historic American Engineering Record (HAER) collections are among the largest and most heavily used in the Prints and Photographs Division of the Library of Congress. Since 2000, documentation from the Historic American Landscapes Survey (HALS) has been added to the holdings. The collections document achievements in architecture, engineering, and landscape design in the United States and its territories through a comprehensive range of building types, engineering technologies, and landscapes, including examples as diverse as the Pueblo of Acoma, houses, windmills, one-room schools, the Golden Gate Bridge, and buildings designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. Administered since 1933 through cooperative agreements with the National Park Service, the Library of Congress, and the private sector, ongoing programs of the National Park Service have recorded America’s built environment in multiformat surveys comprising more than 556,900 measured drawings, large-format photographs, and written histories for more than 38,600 historic structures and sites dating from Pre-Columbian times to the twentieth century. This online presentation of the HABS/HAER/HALS collections includes digitized images of measured drawings, black-and-white photographs, color transparencies, photo captions, written history pages, and supplemental materials. Since the National Park Service’s HABS, HAER and HALS programs create new documentation each year, documentation will continue to be added to the online collections. The first phase of digitization of the Historic American Engineering Record collection was made possible by the generous support of the Shell Oil Company Foundation.
— Library of Congress