This collection contains a journal (November 21, 1894 – February 28, 1896) kept by Gilbert Smith Galbraith while he was serving as a U.S. Naval Cadet on board the USS Columbia. The USS Columbia was a Second Line Cruiser first commissioned on April 23, 1894, serving in the U.S. Navy until it was sold for scrap on January 23, 1922. Galbraith includes detailed technical descriptions of the ship and its components along with diagrams, blueprints, scale plans, maps, photographic prints, cyanotypes and various ephemera. Additionally, Galbraith records the ship's activities from November 21, 1894, to February 28, 1896.
Papers (April 1942 – April 1943, undated) consisting mainly of photographic prints originally belonging to a photograph album compiled by David Y. Taylor, documenting progress on several troubled U.S. Navy construction project contracts to build shipyards and ship repair facilities in the vicinity of Charleston, South Carolina, and Savannah, Georgia; including contracts awarded to Charleston Shipbuilding and Dry Dock Company, the Clifford F. MacEvoy Company, the Savannah Machine & Foundry Company, and to its Shipbuilding Division; including projects to construct plant facilities, dry docks and floating dry docks, caissons, retaining walls, coffer dams, graving docks, piers, wharfs, pilings, and bulkheads, etc.; the photographs also show work crews, including racially integrated crews, and equipment, including: railroads, docks, buildings, trucks, cranes, and pile drivers; also including the leather-bound front cover of the original photograph album.