About the Collection
Colonel Leo Bond Roberts, an Army civil engineer who traveled extensively in his capacity for the military, taking photographs and collecting ephemera and artifacts from his travels throughout Africa, the Middle East and Asia.
The collection includes materials from all phases of Roberts’ life: childhood, college years, officer during World War I, topographer and explorer during the 1920s and 30s, civil engineer, military engineer and planner during World War II and chief engineer of the Jones Beach Marine Theater on Long Island, NY.
Photographs, publications, military awards, African masks, and lantern slides of travels in the Gobi Desert and in Ethiopia are included, along with many other items from Roberts’s travels.
Biography
Born 1887 in Osage, Kansas, the first child of the marriage of David James Roberts and Effie Armstrong Bond, Leo Bond Roberts’ love of travel derived from his father who, as a young man, worked as a newspaper printer in all four countries of the British Isles, in France and in the U.S. David and Effie settled in Washington, D.C. in 1890 when David took a job at the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, part of the U.S. Department of the Treasury responsible for printing money and currency certificates and, from 1894, postage stamps. The Bureau has also printed passports, military commissions and citations (such as the one included in this exhibition), as well as money for other countries. David Roberts was the child of Welsh parents who had emigrated to New York in 1858, and then to Emporia, Kansas in 1870, where they were Lyon County pioneers. The Welsh were the largest ethnic group to settle the county, which had its own newspaper in Welsh during the years 1883-93.
Citations
Hunter, D. "Celebrating a Lifetime of Achievement & Adventure: Leo Bond Roberts, 1887-1954." Exhibit Prepared for the University of Texas at Austin.
Willmann, Travis. "FAL Exhibit Explores and Explorer." Tex Libris. 4 May 2010. Web.
