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Vancouver Barracks Photograph and Negative Collection
In 2014, a private donor gave the VBMA several thousand photographic negatives of people who served or visited the Vancouver Barracks during World War 2. Since then, with the help of many volunteers, we have been cataloging these negatives and scanning them, or photographs preserved with the negatives.
In World War 2, the Vancouver Barracks served as a major training post, as well as port of embarkation for many soldiers who eventually served in the South Pacific. Most of the soldiers and units who trained at the Barracks were not directly involved in combat, rather they were the necessary combat support soldiers who served in diverse units such as bakeries, laundries, refrigeration units, and many other capacities. To train these soldiers, the Vancouver Barracks had a cadre, or staff of many thousand civilians and soldiers, who maintained the post itself. This included construction workers, plumbers, electricians, Barnes Army Hospital, the Red Cross, and so on. In addition to these soldiers and civilians, many other people visited, some for a lengthy period. Many Italian and German Prisoners of War stayed at the Vancouver Barracks after they were captured.
As we continue our work, we hope to try to contact some of the descendents of people whose photographs we have. We would also like to post copies of our photographs online through this website for all to see. Here are some examples of some of the people who lived and served at the Vancouver Barracks.
In 2018 and 2019, the VBMA applied for a $7,400 grant with the Two Rivers Museum, the Clark County Historical Museum, and the Washington State University Library to scan ours and other historic photographs from SW Washington. Our application was received and approved by the Clark County Historical Promotion Grants Program committee. In 2019, the WSU Vancouver Library staff scanned several hundred negatives from the VBMA and Two Rivers collection. They posted low resolution photo images on their website. Here are the results:
Feel free to visit this site to look for friends, relatives and for military history research purposes. Please contact us with questions as well as any findings you make. If you want higher resolution images for publications, we have those as well.
We will add names to this photos at a later date. If you know someone in these photos, please let us know, We want to supply family members with higher resolution pictures of their relatives.
Here are some thumbnails from negatives we scanned on February 13, 2016
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