“Typical houses of Morgantown, West Virginia,” June 1935, by Walker Evans, via Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.
Evans may have taken the photo from an electric post like this one.
Tag: chickens
Vintage landscape: oh, that old thing. . .
Backyard prehistoric standing stone supporting a section of clothesline, Borgholm, Sweden, July 1949, by Mårten Sjöbeck, via Swedish National Heritage Board Commons on flickr.
There appears to be another stone in the neighbor’s yard, on the right side of the photo.
Life in gardens: colored eggs
“Possible now to color yolks of eggs “red, white and blue” by feeding hens different feeds,” April 7, 1939, by Harris & Ewing, via Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.
Washington, D.C., April 7. . . . Charles A. Denton, Junior Chemist, poultry nutrition laboratory of the National Agriculture Research Center, Beltsville, Maryland, feeding a hen a certain food to produce a definite colored yolk.
— from the original Harris & Ewing caption
Blue eggs and ham?
More photos of the Department of Agriculture in action in the 1930s here and here.
. . . Yesterday the egg so fresh
it felt hot in his hand and he pressed it
to his ear. . . .
riveted to the secret of birds
caught up inside his fist. . . .— Naomi Shihab Nye, from “Boy and Egg“
Life in gardens: more chickens
Child with white chickens, taken between 1890 and 1922, by Hugh Mangum, via David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University (on flickr).
Mangum was a traveling photographer who worked along a rail circuit in North Carolina, Virginia, and West Virginia. You can see his portraits here.
Life in gardens: feeding the chickens
A fenced-in backyard in Georgia, ca. 1899, via Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.
These photos were included in one of several albums depicting African American life, which were compiled by W. E. B. Du Bois for the 1900 Paris Exposition.
There’s a brief history of the American backyard here. Until the 20th century, it was a space for work, not recreation.
enclos*ure 