The Jacob Siegmund family settled on a Donation Land Claim in the region above Stayton in the mid-1870s. They were a large family with eleven children, ten of whom survived to adulthood. The Siegmund Collection is a group of photographs taken between 1888 and 1891 by two of the Siegmund brothers, Andrew and Louis, who briefly operated a photography business specializing in outdoor photography. The subjects were predominantly the people and scenes of the area known as the Santiam Canyon east of Salem, Oregon.

The brothers used a tripod and a camera with a Voightlander viewing lens. All of their photographs were time exposures, and none of the negatives were retouched. 210 of their original glass plate negatives were donated to the State Library in March, 1953, by Andrew Siegmund, and prints were made from the negatives. Matilda Siegmund Jones, a former director of the Marion County Historical Society and youngest of the Siegmund children, spent months identifying the people in these photographs, and only six photos remain completely unidentified.

Louis Siegmund died in 1935 as a result of a car accident, and Andrew died in 1962 at 96.

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