The collection consists of a thick three ring binder of plastic covers with construction-paper pages to which archival family and Ragdale photographs are affixed. The photos are labeled in Alice Hayes's handwriting with short captions. There are also some articles, copies of architectural plans and a late 1930s planting plan for the ca. 1912-created Howard and Frances Shaw garden. A large b & w photograph of a plan of the Ragdale estate by students of the Foundation for Architecture and Landscape Architecture is in the tall Hollinger box with the binder. In the early 2000s student Sharon Milroy (Reid) and Arthur Miller met with Mrs. Hayes and the scrapbook to go through it to flesh out from her memory more about the photos and other items. These recollections were transcribed by Sharon and a new list of the Scrapbook contents was prepared then.
The scrapbook grew out of two events, Alice's late 1980s effort to develop a guidebook to Ragdale (published 1990) and her decision to move out of the house into the nearby cabin in the 1990s. She put the book together following the order in which material appeared in the guidebook, and conveyed it to Arthur Miller when he was her immediate successor as president of the Ragdale Foundation in the early 1990s.
Hayes, Alice Ryerson, 1922-