Category: landscape

Fields of grass

Cindy at enclos*ure3 Comments

I love these two pictures of a well-cared-for antebellum mansion in 1939 Alabama with a tall grass lawn — early no-mow or at least seldom-mow.

Above and below is the W.P. Welch Mansion in Selma, Alabama. It was built in 1858.

Years ago, we had neighbors who tore down their house and built another on the same spot, in the style of a Victorian farmhouse. While the contractors were finishing the interior, the small bare front yard was covered with straw. Tall grass soon grew up through it, and the effect was something like the above. It was beautiful — remnants of beige straw, wavy green grass, and one old peegee hydrangea limbed up into a small tree.

Of course, as soon as they could, they tilled it up and put down sod and foundation shrubs. I always thought it was too bad. Before, it had actually evoked some real ideas and emotion about real farms.

Long Lane Farm (above), St. Mary’s County, Maryland.

A lot of the houses I’ve looked at in the Carnegie Survey of the South collection are decrepit or abandoned. They have “lawns” of tall grass, weeds, and a some remaining flowers. But they are beautiful resting in their wavy, ragged negative space. Their foundations aren’t obscured by shrubs; their porches float.

Beauregard House (above), Chalmette, Louisiana.

Cabin (above), St. John the Baptist Parish, Louisiana.

(above) Moccasin, Louisiana.

Uncle Sam Plantation (above), St. James Parish, Louisiana.

Prospect Hill (above), Airlie, North Carolina.

Driscoll Farm (above), St. Mary’s County, Maryland.

Greenway, aka Marlee (above), Charles City County, Virginia.

(above) New Roads, Louisiana.

Elizabeth Hill (above), St. Mary’s County, Maryland.

Woodlawn Plantation (above), Napoleonville, Louisiana.

All photos by Frances Benjamin Johnston, taken in the late 1930s for the Carnegie Survey of the South, via Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

Water tanks

Cindy at enclos*ureLeave a comment

Here are three interesting and rather ornamental examples of 19th century tanks that captured rainwater runoff from house rooftops — all in Louisiana. All photos by Frances Benjamin Johnston via the Carnegie Survey of the South, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

Braeme House, Clinton, Louisiana, 1938; structure built 1834.

Burnside Plantation, Ascension Parish, Louisiana, 1938; built 1840.

San Francisco, St. John’s Parish, Louisiana, 1938; built 1849-1850 in the Steamboat Gothic Style. The tanks are at the sides of the house.

Some outbuildings

Cindy at enclos*ureLeave a comment

According to the authors of Louisiana Buildings: 1720-1940, “it was the custom in French Louisiana to have separate housing for the young men of the family as they grew older. Always within the house grounds and sometimes actually connected to the house, a garçonnière was a way of adding living space without the inconvenience or necessity of modifying the original plan.”

This garçonnière at Burnside Plantation, Ascension Parish, Louisiana, was built about 1840. (All photos by Frances Benjamin Johnston via the Carnegie Survey of the South, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division; all taken in the 1930s.)

Other often pretty outbuildings in the south included pigeonnieres or dovecotes. “Domestic pigeons had value not only as ornamental birds and a delicacy, but as a source of fertilizer.”

Shirley Plantation, Charles City County, Virginia.

Hill Plantation, Wilkes County, Georgia.

Uncle Sam Plantation, St. James Parish, Louisiana; built 1836.

Riverlake Plantation, Point Coupee Parish, Louisiana.

Finally, no pre-twentieth century house could be without one of these little buildings:

Privy, Great Chimney House, Lexington, Georgia.

Privy, Reveille House, Richmond, Virginia.

Privy, Poplar Forest, Lynchburg, Virginia.

Salute to early spring

Cindy at enclos*ure1 Comment

Our mid-March, mostly spent in Washington, D.C., has been more like April this year, and I saw a few dandelions popping up. (And the famous cherry trees — 100 years old this year — are already at their peak.)

Dandelions on meadowland by the Thames by Rod Allday, via Wikipedia under CC license.

The Dandelion’s pallid tube
Astonishes the Grass,
And Winter instantly becomes
An infinite Alas —

The tube uplifts a signal Bud
And then a shouting Flower, —
The Proclamation of the Suns
That sepulture is o’er.

— Emily Dickinson

Old Dunbar Quarters

Cindy at enclos*ure6 Comments

I think these early spring photos of an old house and farm near Falmouth in Stafford County, Virginia, are charming. (Click them to see larger versions.)

Unfortunately, I have not been able to find out anything about the property, which was called Old Dunbar Quarters when the photos were taken in the late 1920s.

The photos were taken by Frances Benjamin Johnston as part of the Carnegie Survey of the South (Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division).