Red Cross Nursing Instruction, Clinic Intake, and Women’s Volunteer Labor in Postwar Florida: George Fulmer, Photograph Archive of 81 items, Clearwater, 1951-1952

George Fulmer Red Cross Nursing

Photograph

Red Cross service photographs by notable Clearwater photographer George Fulmer recording volunteer nursing instruction, clinic intake, fundraising, and civic ceremony in Clearwater, Florida, 1951-1952, with primary source images of the care and volunteer infrastructure that accompanied postwar Sunbelt growth. Fulmer, a Clearwater native, served as a U.S. Navy photographer during World War II and later operated Fulmer Photo Service in the city for decades. Clearwater's midcentury growth fused tourism, real estate development, wartime carryover, and rapid community expansion on Florida’s Gulf Coast is shown throughout Fulmer's work, and this collection depicts some of the local service institutions and their part in daily life as the Sunbelt underwent this rapid change.

Photo archive of 81 items including 40 silver gelatin prints and 41 large format photo negatives, each approximately 3 x 5 inches, comprised of some unique and some duplicate images, Clearwater, Florida, 1951-1952. The photographs center on Red Cross women in uniform, nurses, civic officials, and local participants gathered in training rooms, meeting halls, offices, porches, clinic interiors, and outdoor demonstration spaces. Several photographs show rows of women seated or standing behind tables stacked with Red Cross portfolios marked by large crosses; others record first aid instruction with a body positioned on the floor before seated observers, a nurse holding a small child near a display table, and a formal group around a handshake presentation in front of American flags and Red Cross signage. Additional scenes show a child seated beneath a wall-hung cross during class activity, women sorting dolls, clothing, and relief goods at worktables, a nurse or intake worker writing beneath a visible “Blue Cross Subscribers” sign, a physician or examiner inspecting a man’s throat before shelves of medical supplies, and home-visit style interiors where a seated woman presents a doll while speaking with another woman on a couch. Group portraits of Red Cross women at banquet tables and posed staff views extend the archive from public instruction into the social organization of volunteer service. The surviving negative sleeves carry manuscript dates in 1951 and 1952 and repeated identifications including “Red Cross,” “Red Cross class,” and nurse-related subjects, preserving original working captions and sequence evidence from Fulmer’s studio handling. Photo studio envelope captions date and locate many of the images, as well as some handwritten notes which identify individuals.

The American Red Cross nursing and home-nursing programs had long linked professional care with trained civilian volunteers, and in the postwar United States that model remained central to local health education and emergency readiness. These photos document both a national volunteer infrastructure mobilizing for the Korean conflict, and a small Gulf Coast city in the early phase of the demographic and commercial transformation that would reshape the lower South across the second half of the twentieth century. Clearwater's municipal planning records trace steep population growth after 1950 and the outward movement of commerce and residential life during precisely the years Fulmer was working; his photographs place women's voluntary labor, public health instruction, civic fundraising, and institutional ceremony alongside the development of the sunbelt. George Fulmer's sustained authorship gives the group cohesion as a single-photographer documentary body, while the surviving job envelopes, dated negatives, and alternate frames offer the kind of working-process evidence. Some prints duplicate or nearly duplicate other views, two negatives in poor condition; prints generally clean and very well preserved, with many negatives preserving unique images. Overall very good condition.

Item #23298

Price: $850.00