Born on the Dunlap Road in the Town of Shelby in 1886, Scott B. Dunlap was a member of the fourth generation of the family for whom the road is named. His great-grandfather, William C. Dunlap, came from Seneca County in 1815 and purchased 400 acres from the Holland Land Company for ten shillings an acre. William C., his son Ledlie and grandson Rolla transformed the land “from a wilderness of enormous chestnut trees with the nearest neighbor more than a mile away, and with wolves circling the log hut every night, to a quiet, peaceful, prosperous residence, surrounded by great fields of corn and beans and wheat, flanked with fine apple orchards” 

Scott B. Dunlap was one of the fourteen graduates of Medina High School in 1905. He studied engineering at the University of Michigan. His son, Scott Dunlap Jr., donated a collection of over two hundred glass plate negatives of photographs taken by his father in the early 1900’s to the Medina Historical Society in 2008. The photographs are a treasure trove of candid and unpretentious photographs of family and friends in their daily lives, with friends and family mostly taken outside. There is a charming warmth to these photographs, the subjects are relaxed, at ease, smiling not for a “photographer” but for a young friend enthused with his new camera. His photographs give us a view into ordinary life in a now vanished era, before the arrival of the automobile and the tumult of World War I. There are several photographs from 1905 of powerline transmission workers who labored then to erect the powerlines which we now take for granted as part of our visual landscape.

The collection includes: Medina scenes, Medina school groups, Shelby school groups, Shelby farm scenes, farm homes, Dunlap family groups, neighboring families, school friends, friends and their pets, University of Michigan friends and sporting scenes, the Falls at Niagara Falls, Power line workers for the Niagara, Lockport and Ontario Power Co.,  and post-mortem photographs. 

The collection was digitized in 2019 and was the subject of a Medina Historical Society program in Oct. 2019. We hope you enjoy the following selections from this important local history collection. 

For more of the Dunlap photos, visit www.historicmedina.org.