This is the second post in a three-part series about Dr. Eugene A. Stead Jr. (1908-2005), professor and chair of the Department of Medicine at Duke University School of Medicine from 1947 to 1967. To spotlight the addition to and reprocessing of the Eugene A. Stead Jr. Papers, this post will delve into Stead’s family life contained in the scrapbooks and family albums recently added to the collection, which document the history of the Stead family and illustrate the guiding influence Stead’s family life had on the work he did every day.
The first post introduces Stead, highlighting his accomplishments and career.
The third post discusses how the Archives preserved the scrapbooks and the steps we took to maintain context while separating materials for preservation.
Untitled Album 2, page 65 (left), dated 1952, and Untitled Album 3, page 84 (right), dated 1957. Clippings marking important events in the Stead family, including Dr. Stead’s speech for the Ogden Surgical Society, Lucy’s confirmation, and the publication of Evelyn Stead’s 1956 cookbook Low-fat Cookery.
In 2020, the Archives received an addition from the Physician Assistant Historical Society of mostly photographic materials, including thirty albums and scrapbooks likely assembled by Stead’s wife, Evelyn Selby Stead, containing photographs, clippings, ephemera, programs, pamphlets, correspondence, and children’s artwork. The albums arrived at the Archives untitled and are organized by assigned number in the Albums Subseries of the Photographic Materials Series.
For the remainder of this blog post, to honor and make space for the obvious care Evelyn put into making the albums, I will refer to the Steads by their first names: Eugene and Evelyn, along with their children Nancy, Lucy, and Bill. In addition to marking Eugene’s professional milestones, Evelyn’s albums contain abundant material documenting the growth and successes of an upper-middle-class family with a strong presence in medicine, pointing to Evelyn’s involvement with the Duke Hospital Auxiliary (Untitled Album 6), Nancy’s education at Duke School of Medicine, and Bill’s pioneering role in the field of bioinformatics while at Duke. A small selection of materials also pertain to the Steads’ extended family histories encompassing Eugene’s family in Georgia and Evelyn’s family in Massachusetts.
Untitled Album 1, page 82. Photographs of Lucy and Nancy with Eugene dated 1946.
Untitled Album 1, page 86. Photographs of Lucy and Nancy with Evelyn dated 1946.
Untitled Album 5, page 27. Photographs of Bill and Lucy with Eugene dated 1953.
The albums allude to how protective Evelyn and Eugene were of their close-knit family’s time together, and researchers of these materials will easily be able to glean how Evelyn and the family found and held onto moments of beauty. Album pages overflow with blooming flowers, birdwatching, family pets, and long days spent in one another’s company.
Untitled Album 6, page 62. Photographs of Nancy, Lucy, and Bill playing on Duke campus dated 1956.
Untitled Album 9, page 7. Photographs of cardinals and titmouse dated May 1954.
Untitled Album 10, page 46. Photographs from a brown envelope inscribed “Extra Prints,” containing snapshots of Honah Lee’s construction in progress dated circa 1957.
Of special note are photographs depicting views of the family’s house Honah Lee* on Kerr Lake, which they built together. Eugene and Evelyn began building Honah Lee likely by the 1950s, according to photographs in Untitled Album 10, and continued to build the house by hand for many years, making time for small construction projects on the weekends and in the family’s spare time together. Over the following decades, well beyond Eugene’s 1967 retirement from Duke, the Steads welcomed many guests, personal and professional, to Honah Lee. Untitled Albums 8, 26, and 27, among other albums from the 1980s to 2000s, are peak lake house. Researchers using this collection will find in Honah Lee the beating heart of all Stead family activity: Nancy and Alan’s 1984 wedding, a bustling parade of dogs and hamsters, an amaryllis blooming in the same windowsill over multiple years, meals enjoyed together, and the well-worn-ness of everyday life belonging to a family that remained close.
Untitled Album 8, page 26. Photographs and labeled diagrams dated around 1996.
Untitled Album 8, page 15. Photograph of Eugene making pancakes dated around 1994.
Untitled Album 24. Photograph of the Steads’ grandchild, Elizabeth, and a plate possibly indicating Dr. Walter Kempner’s presence at the Steads’ dinner table, or his gift of tasty crustaceans in absentia, dated 1986.
Untitled Albums 22 and 23 contain letters from colleagues, friends, and family to celebrate Eugene and Evelyn’s eightieth birthdays, respectively. These albums are an especially good starting point for researchers seeking an overview of the Stead family tree and the individuals who remained connected throughout their lives. More than this, the albums show how the family took the time to say how much they loved each other and how much they meant to one another. In a letter to Eugene, one of the Steads’ grandchildren, Pat, writes tenderly of summers spent at Honah Lee: “‘God has made everything beautiful in its time.’ And you have made time for all the Steads. I bet a nickel that we always remember.” Albums dating to the 1980s onwards depict the last decades of Evelyn and Eugene’s lives together, growing old in the house they built by hand with their family.
The albums will be of interest to anyone studying the history of the Stead family, roles in families with a strong presence in medicine, vernacular photography, children’s artwork and child-created materials in archives, and scrapbooking. The albums also contain abundant travel photography and ephemera from Cuzco, Hawaii, the Pacific Northwest, and beyond. Other ephemera that might spark curiosity include keepsakes from friends and colleagues. Tucked in Untitled Album 15 is a slim children’s book about a groundhog written by Stella May Taylor, whose son, Grant Taylor, MD, published her story in the 1980s after finding it tucked into her own scrapbook.
Untitled Album 15, page 48. Book and pamphlet dated around 1986.
The Eugene A. Stead Jr. Papers reflect Stead’s personal and professional life in his correspondence, subject files, grant materials, writings, speeches, manuscript materials, certificates, awards, photographs, family albums, clippings, and audiotapes. Stay tuned for the third and final post in this series about how the Archives preserved the scrapbooks and family albums, maintaining context while separating materials for preservation.
Users seeking further materials related to the Stead family are encouraged to reference the William W. Stead Collection, History of Medicine Collections, Eskind Biomedical Library, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN. (https://collections.library.vanderbilt.edu/repositories/3/resources/1910. Accessed June 30, 2025.)
For more about the Archives’ holdings, search and explore our finding aids or collection guides.
For any questions, contact the Archives staff.
This blog post was contributed by Medical Center Archives Intern Kayla Cavenaugh.
*Oh, hello there, Dear Reader. Did you, like me, also go through a Peter, Paul, and Mary phase as an 11-year-old? Did the phrase “Honah Lee” nevertheless echo around in my head unconsciously for weeks on end, while I turned page after page after page of Stead family scrapbooks, before I finally made the connection that Honah Lee is the autumnal misty homeland by the sea inhabited by Puff the Magic Dragon? Yep, it sure did.