Althea Boxell (1910-1988)
“Althea Boxell never lived in Provincetown, but during her life she assembled a series of scrapbooks that preserved elements of Provincetown’s history and daily life throughout the late 19th and 20th century that are priceless.
“Miss Boxell was descended from some of the oldest Provincetown families and maintained a close kinship network with Provincetown. Page by page and in painstaking detail, Boxell preserved news clippings, photographs, postcards, brochures and anecdotes, all annotated by her in typeface, establishing a context for places and events that make them intimately personal.
“To browse these pages, thousands of them, is to be guided back through time to witness the history, and changes, of Provincetown as a most unique, and uniquely beautiful, place.
“These albums were fortuitously preserved by John Dowd, who rescued them from potential oblivion. He has generously loaned them to the History Preservation Project for imaging so that they might be accessible to all.”
From the Provincetown History Preservation Project website.