The Southern Oregon Historical Society in Medford has received a combined $28,000 in grant money to digitize over 6,000 glass plate negatives made by Jacksonville photographer Peter Britt.

The Oregon Heritage Commission awarded $381,262 in grants to 33 organizations throughout the state late last year to fund a variety of projects, including collection preservation and access, research, oral history, exhibits and performance projects. The Heritage Commission is part of Oregon Heritage, a division of Oregon Parks and Recreation Department.

Along with $16,000 from Oregon Heritage, SOHS received $8,000 from the Schwemm Family Foundation and $4,000 from the Pacific Power Foundation for the project.

SOHS’ Library Archivist Jan Wright discovered the negatives.

“The Historical Society has had several rotations of librarians and archivists, and the Britt negatives hadn’t been entered into our database,” Wright said in a phone interview. “We use Past Perfect software, an industry standard, to catalogue such artifacts.

“One day, I was looking through some wooden boxes in a corner of the library and found this treasure trove of glass plates, all from Peter Britt. Someone had built the boxes and put sleeves around the plates, labeled them if the subject was known, and of course we got excited.”

Britt is a nationally known photographer who came to Jacksonville in 1852. He would walk out his front door and take photos from the same point of view since the time of the early white settlers.

“In these photos you can see tent camps, Chinatown and the whole town develop over time,” Wright said.

Britt’s son, Emil, took over after his father died in 1905 but didn’t have quite the same eye for photography.

Earlier in its history, SOHS had uncovered a collection of smaller Britt glass plate negatives and decided to make prints from some, which are now on display at the Oregon Heritage Commission in Portland, as well as Southern Oregon University in Ashland.

“These were much smaller than the large glass plates found in our boxes,” Wright said. “We received the bulk of the Britt estate materials prior to the fire that affected the house. When we discovered the plates, which had not been digitized due to their size and fragility, we decided to preserve the images.”

Doug Smith, a professional Ashland photographer, is named in the grant application as the person handling the plates. He has hand-built custom frames to hold the plates so they can be put on a light table. Not all the plates are the same size, and not always cut square, so this is an essential step in the preservation process.

The Historical Society — housed for over three decades in a former JCPenney building at 106 N. Central Ave. — has operated a research library since the mid-20th century, according to Anna Sloan, the organization’s curator.