Francis E. Old Jr., photograph collection

Francis E. Old, Jr. (died 1985), was a book editor who worked for the Williams and Wilkins publishing company in Baltimore. As a young adult, he settled briefly on Cator Avenue in Waverly before moving to 1101 North Calvert where he lived throughout the 1940s. In the early 1950s, he and his wife Dorothy M. Old moved to Old Harford Road in Baltimore County.

Old was an avid collector of Baltimore printed ephemera, amassing materials which originated in the 18th through 20th centuries, including maps, correspondence, pamphlets, brochures, and other printed materials. His collections were sold at a Howard Street auction house in the 1980s. Much of the material he had bought on Howard Street, but at junk stores in the 1930s and 1940s, rather than antique dealers or auction houses.

Old also created documents of Baltimore; in particular, in the 1930s he made a set of photographs of Baltimore city sites which he felt were "in danger of razing or of natural disintegration because of age and lack of care" (according to Dorothy Old, from a 1987 letter to the Maryland Historical Society). Some of the sites have, in fact, disappeared, for example, Bolton Park (at Rutter, Dolphin and John Sts.), the eastern half of the 1200 block of Mount Royal Avenue, Read Street intersecting Biddle, or the McKim House at 522 Park Avenue, which Old photographed in the process of demolition to make way for a Hoschild Kohn warehouse.