“Reading the paper in a Gympie[, Queensland,] garden,” ca. 1871, by Edward H. Forster, via State Library of Queensland Commons on flickr.
Edward Forster was a professional photographer who worked in and around Gympie, a gold-mining town in eastern Australia, during the 1870s. Many of his photos feature local families in front of their cottages.
‘Gympie’ is an aboriginal term for Dendrocnide moroides, a stinging shrub in the area.
Stokes-McHenry House, 240 S. 2nd St., Madison, Georgia, 1939 or 1944, by Frances Benjamin Johnston, via Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.
This porch is certainly a strong contender for “best in latticework.” The woodwork around the front door is not bad either.
The house was built in the 1820s in the Federal style. The porch was given its current Italianate and Gothic features in the 1850s. It still stands — the property of descendants of its original owners.
W. C. Child Ranch, near Helena, Montana, ca. 1890,* from an Historic American Building Survey (HABS), via Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.
Mr. Child became rich from prospecting in Montana. He built this octagonal house on his 3,000-acre ranch in the late 1880s.
However, he used it not as a home, but as a party space. (The whole second floor was a ballroom.) He and his friends — sometimes over 100 — would take the Northern Pacific train from nearby Helena for banquets and dances lasting late into the night.
By 1893, Child was broke and had to assign the ranch to another man. He was found dead in the house a month later.
Child called the ranch “White Face Farm” for the Hereford cattle he raised there, and he built Montana’s largest barn to protect them during the winters. There are more details here.
The house and barn still exist as a special events center called Kleffner Ranch. *Both HABS pictures here were photocopies of original photographs; the originals are in the collection of the Historical Society of Montana.
“Lynch Farm, St. Mary’s County, Maryland,” 1936 or 1937, by Frances Benjamin Johnston, via Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.
You can scroll through over a year’s worth of Sunday porches here.
Continue reading “The Sunday porch: St. Mary’s County”
More properly called by their genus name, Pelargonium.
An enclosed front porch in Chamisal, New Mexico, July 1940, by Russell Lee, via Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.
Lee and his wife, Jean, spent two weeks in Chamisal and Peñasco documenting the lives of the towns’ Hispanic small farmers and ranchers. Both communities are located along the High Road to Taos, which begins in Santa Fe and crosses the high desert and forest of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains.
The area was the setting for the 1974 book The Milagro Beanfield War — as well as the filming location for the 1988 movie of the same name. Milagro was the first of a trilogy of novels by John Nichols about north central New Mexico. The second and third books were set in the fictional town of Chamisaville.
enclos*ure 