Scope and arrangement
The Dartington Hall School Students Scrapbook was compiled by Nonny Gardner and memorializes her and her friends' American travels in 1933, her first year living in the United States. Gardner and her friends stayed in a New York City Park Avenue penthouse owned by Dorothy Whitney Straight, the Whitney family country house in the Adirondacks, and the Whitney's Applegreen estate in Old Westbury, Long Island before embarking on a months' long cross-country tour of the United States. The students visited the World's Fair in Chicago; the Rocky Mountains; Utah; New Mexico; the Grand Canyon; RKO Studios in Hollywood; San Francisco; and Oregon. The scrapbook provides a view of the United States in the 1930s as seen through the eyes of a group of young, affluent, creative outsiders.
The scrapbook's binding bolts have been removed. Affixed to the sleeved loose scrapbook pages are a mix of snapshot photographs taken by Gardner and others, picture postcards, maps, ticket stubs, travel brochures, telegrams, hotel stationery, and other ephemera. Any items that have come unglued from pages are interleaved at their original page postion.
Short captions handwritten by Gardner appear throughout the scrapbook. Occasionally, especially in the sections pertaining to the Southwestern States region, Gardner's captions, those appearing on picture postcards, and those within travel brochures contain condescending, offensive, or racist references to Indigenous peoples.