The Sunday porch: cats’ day

Everyone gets a rocking chair. . . .

Mr. and Mrs. D. T. Powell on their front porch, Harrisburg, Oregon, 1909, from the Gerald W. Williams Collection, via OSU (Oregon State University) Special Collections & Archives on flickr.

Today is National Cat Day in the U.S.

The dog cart

“Toddler in a Dog Cart, Victoria,” ca. 1925, via The Biggest Family Album in Australia, Museums Victoria (under CC license).

The dog seems OK with the situation, but the baby is not happy.

The plants in the flower beds are all individually labeled.  They look somewhat like carnations.

Saint Hilarion, France


On the grounds of the Chateau de Voisins, Saint Hilarion, France, October 26, 1927, by
Roger Dumas, via Archives of the Planet Collection – Albert Kahn Museum /Département des Hauts-de-Seine.

This autochrome is one of about seventy-two thousand that were commissioned and then archived by Albert Kahn, a wealthy French banker and pacifist, between 1909 and 1931. Kahn sent thirteen photographers and filmmakers to fifty countries “to fix, once and for all, aspects, practices, and modes of human activity whose fatal disappearance is no longer ‘a matter of time.'”* The resulting collection is called Archives de la Planète and now resides in its own museum at Kahn’s old suburban estate at Boulogne-Billancourt, just west of Paris. Since June 2016, the archive has also been available for viewing online here.


*words of Albert Kahn, 1912. Also, the above photo (A 51 744) is © Collection Archives de la Planète – Musée Albert-Kahn and used under its terms, here.

Horsham, Victoria

“Henry Smith and family in front of a wooden house with a bark roof at Green Park,” Horsham, Victoria, ca. 1875, via The Biggest Family Album in Australia and Museums Victoria (under CC license).

The Sunday porch: duplex

West Bolton Street porch, Victorian Historic District, Savannah, Georgia, 1979, by Walter Smalling for an Historic American Building Survey (HABS), via Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division

The house still stands and looks much the same as in the picture above.