Rose Hill, Yanceyville, North Carolina, 1938, by Frances Benjamin Johnston, via Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.
I like to imagine that front door as yellow.
The house still stands and continues to be owned by the Brown family, who built it in 1800.
You can view larger versions of these photos by clicking on ‘Continue reading’ and then on either thumbnail in the gallery.
Nothing moves in boxwood
where gray soldiers lie.— Dave Smith, from “Winesaps“
“Road to Nicholson Hollow. Shenandoah National Park, Virginia,” October 1935, by Arthur Rothstein, via Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.
I think this would be a good reference picture for making a dry stream bed path through a naturalistic garden (click to enlarge).
More on Nicholson Hollow this Sunday. . . .
Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
mi ritrovai per una selva oscura
che la diritta via era smarritaThe Divine Comedy – Pt. 1 Inferno – Canto 1 – (1-3)
13. In the middle of the journey
of our life
I came to myself
In a dark forest
The straightforward way
Misplaced.
(Schwerner, 2000)— Caroline Bergvall, from “VIA” (48 Dante Variations)
Rustic bench at Ladder Creek Gardens, Newhalem, Washington. Photo taken 1989 for an Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS), via Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.
The gardens, next to Ladder Creek Falls, were landscaped during the 1930s as a showcase for the Skagit Hydroelectric Project, which now provides power to the city of Seattle.
My husband and I were arguing about a bench we wanted to buy and put in part of our backyard, a part which is actually a meadow of sorts. . . . My husband wanted a four foot bench and I wanted a five foot bench. This is what we argued about. My husband insisted that a four foot bench was all we needed, since no more than two people (presumably ourselves) would ever sit on it at the same time. I felt his reasoning was not only beside the point but missed it entirely; I said what mattered most to me was the idea of the bench, the look of it there, to be gazed at with only the vaguest notion it could hold more people than would ever actually sit down. The life of the bench in my imagination was more important than any practical function the bench might serve. . . .
— Mary Ruefle, from “The Bench“
A late afternoon gathering on the south portico (or back porch) of the White House, probably between 1890 and 1910, photographer unknown, via the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.
Encyclopedia Britannica defines ‘portico’ as a “colonnaded porch or entrance to a structure, or a covered walkway supported by regularly spaced columns. Porticoes formed the entrances to ancient Greek temples.”
The south portico of the White House was built in 1824, principally from an 1807 design by architect Benjamin Henry Latrobe, then Surveyor of Public Buildings. Latrobe was appointed and supervised by Thomas Jefferson, who loved neoclassical design and called Palladio’s books “the bible.”
The South of France
Roman temple
“simple and sublime”Maria Cosway
harpist
on his mindwhite column
and arch— Lorine Niedecker, from “Thomas Jefferson“
PX beer garden at Fort Jackson, South Carolina, June 14, 1944, by Victor Alfred Lundy, via the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.
A beer garden is simply a shady outdoor area with tables and chairs where beer and sometimes food is served. The idea originated in the Bavaria region of Germany in the 19th century and soon came to America. There’s a brief history of beer gardens in the U.S. here.
Some American beer gardens were such pleasant, seemingly wholesome places that they rattled the resolve of the temperance movement. A woman on a committee investigating Chicago drinking spots wrote of one: “Isn’t it beautiful? Can it be, is it possible, that after all our ideas are wrong and these people are right?”
Beer gardens, like the one pictured above, were features of at least some homeland military camps and forts in the mid 1940s. Camp Mackall in North Carolina had six. I found a reference to one at Fort McClellan near Anniston, Alabama.
During his U.S. Army service, Victor Lundy filled eight sketchbooks with scenes of his training at Fort Jackson, his life on a transport ship crossing the Atlantic, and his frontline duty in France.
After the war, he became an architect, admired today for “his sculptural sense of form” and “innovative use of engineering technology,” according to the Smithsonian Institution.
enclos*ure 