Perspective, western prairie

Cindy at enclos*ure2 Comments

Sweetwater Co., Wyoming, 1930s, A. Rothstein, Library of Congress“Highway U.S. 30, Sweetwater County, Wyoming” by Arthur Rothstein, March 1940, via Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

Eternal prairie and grass, with occasional groups of trees.  Frémont prefers this to every other landscape.  To me it is as if someone would prefer a book with blank pages to a good story.

– Charles Preuss, Exploring with Frémont

Preuss was a mapmaker who accompanied John Frémont on two of his explorations of the American West in the 1840s.  Together, they mapped the Oregon Trail and discovered Lake Tahoe.

Frémont — who was later the first Republican candidate for President — always played the iconic hero-explorer;  Preuss, at least in his diaries, was a grumbling realist.  “My pants are torn,” was the gist of his comments for the day the Frémont planted an American flag on what he believed was the highest place in the Rocky Mountains.

There’s a funny account of Preuss, here, on This American Life:  “The Homesick Explorer.”  And here.

Vintage landscape: tobacco flower

Cindy at enclos*ure2 Comments

“George Barbee, 13 years old topping. . . . Nicholas County, Kentucky” by Lewis Hine, August 1916, via the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

Tobacco plants have to be topped and suckered in order to produce good leaves for market.   The flowers of Nicotiana tabacum are pink.

Photo by Donald Lee Pardue, via flickr.  

A short documentary about traditional tobacco growing methods is here.

Vintage landscape: picket fence and carriage platform

Cindy at enclos*ureLeave a comment

“Fence style — Hebron Lutheran Church, State Routes 638 & 654, Madison, Madison Co., Virginia.” The photo — taken 1937 or 1941, photographer unknown — is part of an Historic American Building Survey (report written 1979), via Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

The church was constructed in 1740 by German settlers. The Madison area is between the cities of Culpepper and Charlottesville.

The church and at least one of its platforms (there were three) still exist, but the fence is gone.

I’m traveling for the next week or so, but I’ll be posting a “vintage landscape” from time to time. Thanks for your comments. I’ll try to answer everyone when I get home.

Vintage landscape: supper in the grove

Cindy at enclos*ure2 Comments

“Table in picnic grove set for St. Thomas church supper near Bardstown, Kentucky,” August 1940, by Marion Post Wolcott via the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

Vintage landscape: stump fences

Cindy at enclos*ure2 Comments

The stump or root fences on the Corner road remind me of fossil remains of mastodons, etc., exhumed and bleached in sun and rain.
— Henry David Thoreau, Journal (July 19, 1851)

Both photos: “A New England stump fence,” ca. 1890-1901, by Detroit Publishing Co., via Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

I had heard of  ‘stumperies,’ but not of stump fences (sometimes called root fences), however now I’ve learned that . . .

[s]tump fences, as their name implies, were made by dragging the stumps of trees to the edge of a field and placing them side by side, with their interlacing roots facing outward and their trunks inward. In the days when “ugly as a stump fence” was a simile in common usage, the stump fence had its critics, but in 1837 one observer called it “a singular fence…needing no mending, and lasting the ‘for ever’ of this world.” “The devil himself couldn’t move a stump fence,” farmers used to say, an opinion borne out by the fact that stump fences well over a hundred years old can still be seen in parts of Canada and in the Midwest.

Stumps were often the product of the first clearing of the land, but stump fences didn’t appear in the first generation of a settlement’s fences because stumps need to sit in the ground for six to ten years before they are loose enough to be pulled out and hauled away. Extracting even a loosened stump was never easy; it required oxen and strong chains, something that many settlers lacked at first. In the 1800s, stump pulling would become a cash business and one way that a man could make a good living. Twenty-five cents a stump was the standard price in 1850 when men operating such mechanical stump pullers as the “Portable Goliath,” “The Little Giant,” and “Roger’s Patent Extractor” could extract from twenty to fifty stumps a day.

–Susan Allport, Sermons in Stone: The Stone Walls of New England and New York  (older edition here)

Quotes via the blog Laudator Temporis Acti.

I’m traveling for the next couple of weeks, but I’ll be posting a ‘vintage landscape’ from time to time.