Farmhouse porch with plants in painted lard buckets, Morehead, Kentucky, 1940, by Marion Post Wolcott for U.S. Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information, via Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.
I wish we could see the colors of the painted* containers.
Two special supports were built along the front of the porch to display the plants. (There’s a third view of the house here.)
*Here, here, and here are examples of 1930s interior paint color combinations.
My first “Sunday porch,” from August 2013. . .
Strawberry Hill plantation, Greene County, Alabama, in 1939, by Frances Benjamin Johnston, via Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.
The front porch is often a box seat for the theater of the garden or the street. This one seems to have half drawn its curtains against the buzzing, chirping action of the cottage garden below.
The mid-19th century house still exists, although without the vines and flowers. Its surrounding land is now a cattle ranch.
A repeat porch from June 2014. . .
“Remains of log dogtrot house near Webberville Road. . . Austin Texas,” 1935, probably by Fannie Ratchford, via Texas State Archives.
Unfortunately, it’s a little out of focus, but still beautiful.
. . . I woo the wind
That still delays his coming. Why so slow,
Gentle and voluble spirit of the air?
Oh, come and breathe upon the fainting earth
Coolness and life!— William Cullen Bryant, from “Summer Wind“
A repeat porch from October 2013. . .
Nicholas County, Kentucky, November 1940, by John Vachon, via Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.
What frills attached to such a simple farmhouse and yard.
Her dress goes with the house and her curls with the porch.
A repeat porch from September 2013. . .
Seven Washington, D.C., rowhouses, 1939, by David Myers, via Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.
The name of the neighborhood was not given in the original caption. It was only described as “one of the nicer old sections of the city.” It looks like Capitol Hill to me.
In his book, The American Porch, Michael Dolan attempts to trace the European, African, and Asian origins of our many types of porches. The front stoop — several steps and a small landing — came from the Dutch.
Down the coast [from New England], in Nieuw Amsterdam, a different entry was proliferating. Made of stone or brick, the stoep — Dutch for “step” — was a roofless link between doorway and street. Though municipal tradition required a building’s occupants to maintain the stoep, the Dutch deemed it public territory. However, in Nieuw Amsterdam, the stoop acquired a private connotation: “. . . before each door there was an elevation, to which you could ascend by some steps from the street,” an observer wrote. “It resembled a small balcony, and had some benches on both sides on which the people sat in the evening, in order to enjoy the fresh air, and have the pleasure of viewing those who passed it.”
The stoops above lack benches, but the owner of the first one has brought down a chair, and two doors down there is a park bench in the tiny garden. You can see a similar arrangement here.
enclos*ure 