Posted by Brett Nelson
on May 18, 2026
Every Bella Frye print begins with a document. A patent drawing filed by a Victorian barber in 1873. A bird's-eye view of Boston Harbor lithographed before the Civil War. A naval schematic of the USS Arizona, drafted by engineers who never imagined it would become a memorial. These aren't decorations we invented — they're artifacts that survived long enough to matter, and our job is to make sure they keep mattering.
Where the Originals Live
The vast majority of our source material comes from two institutions that have spent over a century preserving America's visual record: the Library of Congress and the National Archives. Between them, they hold tens of millions of maps, photographs, patent drawings, engineering schematics, and lithographs — most of it digitized, all of it in the public domain.
The Library of Congress Geography and Map Division alone holds more than 5.5 million maps and atlases, including the bird's-eye view city maps that form the backbone of our vintage map collection. These panoramic lithographs — depicting cities like Washington D.C., New Orleans, Pittsburgh, Boston, and Oakland from an elevated vantage point — were produced commercially in the 19th century as a way for proud citizens to celebrate their growing towns. They were sold as prints, mailed as postcards, and hung in offices and parlors. Today, they're primary historical documents.
Our patent print collection draws heavily from the National Archives, which holds the original patent drawings submitted to the U.S. Patent Office going back to the 1790s. When a Victorian barber invented a new straight razor or neck shaving template, he had to submit a precise technical drawing alongside his application. Those drawings — filed by craftsmen, tinkerers, and engineers — are some of the most beautiful functional art ever produced in America.
The Lithographic Publishers: Currier & Ives and Beyond
Not all of our sources are government archives. Some of the most iconic American imagery of the 19th century came from commercial lithographic publishers — firms that produced and sold prints the way streaming services distribute content today: at volume, for a mass audience, on every subject imaginable.
The most famous of these was Currier & Ives, the New York firm that operated from 1835 to 1907 and produced over 7,500 distinct titles. They documented American life with an almost journalistic thoroughness — clipper ships and steam locomotives, Civil War battles and frontier landscapes, winter sleigh rides and summer regattas. Their prints hung in homes across the country and shaped how Americans visualized their own era. When we work with Currier & Ives imagery, we're working with material that was designed from the start to be seen, shared, and lived with.
From Archive to Studio
Finding the right source is only the beginning. Once we identify an image worth printing, we work to obtain the highest-resolution scan available — often going directly to the institution's digital collections or, in some cases, commissioning new scans of physical originals. We then do careful restoration work: removing foxing and age damage, correcting color shifts from decades of storage, and sharpening details that have faded over time.
The goal is never to make the image look new. It's to make it look the way it looked when it was made — before time got to it.
Every print is then produced to order at our studio in Camas, Washington, using archival pigment inks on premium canvas stock. Our frames are hand-finished in our shop. Nothing sits in a warehouse. Nothing is mass-produced overseas. When your print arrives, it was made for you, from a document that was made for history.
That's the Bella Frye process. We think it's worth knowing.
