Honnold/Mudd Special Collections holds materials from all over the world. This map of the diamond regions of what is now Namibia is part of a report compiled in 1921 for Consolidated Diamond Mines of South West Africa, Ltd. (since 1994 Namdeb Diamond Corporation), founded by Mr. (later Sir) Ernest Oppenheimer.
The report is part of the papers of William Lincoln Honnold (1866-1950), mining engineer and together with Oppenheimer co-founder of Anglo American Corporation. Born in Illinois, Honnold lived in South Africa from 1902 until 1915, when he moved to London to serve as London director of his friend Herbert Hoover’s Committee for Relief of Belgium (in 1917, he returned to the United States to serve as New York director for the same organization). Upon retiring in the early 1920s, Honnold moved to California, where he and his wife, Caroline, became dedicated supporters of higher education, in particular Caltech and the Claremont Colleges. Honnold was a member of the first Board of Fellows of Claremont College, and also served as a member of the Pomona College Board of Trustees. He and his wife provided the funds to build Honnold Library. Honnold was also a close friend and colleague of the Mudd family, some of whose papers are also in Special Collections.
The Honnold papers contain a wealth of papers and photographs documenting mining in the United States and Southern Africa in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, life in Southern California in the 1920s and 1930s, famous individuals such as Oppenheimer and Hoover, and the history of the Claremont Colleges. The collection is currently being processed, and a finding aid will be available shortly.