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About the Studio:

George Dexter Sherrill (1879–1931) opened the first photography studio in Haywood County on Depot Street in downtown Waynesville in 1902. In 1906 his studio became the first Eastman Kodak franchise west of Asheville and the third in North Carolina. Sherrill’s photography roots began in Jackson County, North Carolina where he learned the art from his brother-in-law, A. L. Ensley. Beulah Eloise Ashe Ensley (1899-1991) apprenticed with Sherrill in 1917 and worked in the studio with her husband, Sherrill’s nephew, Ralph Ensley (1894-1975) until Ralph’s death. The Ensley’s demolished the original studio in 1943, dug the site to street level, and built an International style building.

About the Unclaimed Envelopes:

People in, or passing through, the Waynesville community brought their film into Sherrill’s Photography Studio to be developed. Sometimes the developed film did not get picked up and when the studio closed in 1975 these envelopes, with prints and negatives enclosed, were packed up and stored away. In 2019, the Haywood County Historical and Genealogical Society donated the collection to Western Carolina University’s Special Collections. The collection consists of three categories: unclaimed prints that include the customer’s name, thousands of portraits of unidentified people, and hundreds of personal photographs from the Sherrill family. At WCU they have been organized and preserved in archival folders and boxes.

Although there is more to the collection, this website is dedicated to the digitized portion of the Unclaimed Envelopes that were brought to Sherrill’s Studio for developing, and that includes a customer name, but were never picked up. We hope that you will be able to help us solve the mysteries of the prints and negatives inside these envelopes and we also look forward to reuniting families with digitized versions of their relative’s long-lost images.

The goal of this website is to connect family and community members to the photographs in the collection that were never picked up from the studio. The photos represented here have a last, and sometimes first, name but otherwise have no identifying information and the majority were taken from the 1930s until the 1960s. By providing a searchable database, we hope to facilitate discovery and connection. Digitized images from the Sherrill Studio Collection can be viewed only at the Southern Appalachian Digital Collections website. Additionally, not all unclaimed photographs have been digitized, and therefore we recommend searching both this database, as well as browsing this list of names which have associated sets of photos.