Welcome

A girl with a bow in her hair, having tea with her toy rabbit and doll

Butler County Gallery is the home of thousands of historic images of the people and places in Butler County and the surrounding area, from the early 1890s until today. Our collection includes the Boston Studio, The Banner-Press archives, the Butler County Cemeteries index, and more. It is the result of thousands of hours of work from an all-volunteer, non-profit, historic preservation organization. It is governed by a local volunteer Board that includes members of the Boston Studio Project, The Thorpe, Inc. Board, the Butler County Genealogy Society, and members of the Hruska Library staff.

Volunteers originally dubbed themselves the Boston Studio Project, because their first task—and at the time, their only task—was to organize, clean, and catalog over 68,000 negatives from the Boston Studio. Work began in 2002 and has now grown to include a variety of other historic image collections and a county-wide cemeteries database.

Descriptions for each photo collection may be accessed by clicking on the Photo Galleries link at the top of the page. You can browse the scanned images in each collection or perform a name/subject search across all items in all collections. There are over 75,000 negatives in our collection, of which only about 12,500 have been scanned so far. Volunteers scan more negatives as time permits and as customers request thumbnails of images that they are interested in. 

If you have questions or comments, use the Contact/Feedback page or email us at: butlercountygallery@outlook.com.