Federal Hill, Fredericksburg, Virginia, between 1927 and 1929, Frances Benjamin Johnston, via Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.
Peacocks are probably the ultimate garden ornament — if you have the room and patience. (It takes several years for a male to grow a substantial tail covert or “train.”)
. . . in Southwest Washington, D.C., 1941, by Edwin Rosskam, via Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.
Southwest is the capital’s smallest quadrant, located south of the National Mall along the Potomac River. After the Civil War, it was populated by freed Blacks to its east and Scotch, Irish, German, and Eastern European immigrants to its west. Its old neighborhoods were largely destroyed in some very questionable “urban renewal” in the 1950s.
Summer specializes in time, slows it down almost to dream…
— Jennifer Grotz, from “Late Summer“
Beatrice Baxter Ruyl on the chaise lounge with Barbara, and Mr. Ruyl seated with Ruth, 1913, by F. Holland Day, via The Louise Imogen Guiney Collection, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.
The photo was probably taken at Five Islands, Maine, where both F. Holland Day and the Ruyl family had homes.
Day was part of the pictorialist movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Its photographers posed or otherwise manipulated their images to create ‘fine art.’
Baxter Ruyl illustrated children’s books and also drew for the Boston Herald. She frequently served as a model for Day and Gertrude Käsebier.
Happy Labor Day weekend in the U.S.!
“Washington, D.C. The home of Miss Norma Kale, a Woodrow Wilson High School English teacher,” October 1943, by Esther Bubley, via Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division (all photos here).
What a charming, patchwork quilt of a house: a Gothic window, a Dutch Colonial Revival shape, and a couple of Greek columns. The screened porch angles away from each side of the door. There are climbing rose canes around the downstairs windows.
The specific location is not given. The Palisades neighborhood in northwest Washington comes to mind. It still has old tall trees and funny little houses set among them. But much more of the city must have looked that way 70 years ago.
Bubley took a large number of photographs of students and teachers at Woodrow Wilson High School — including several of Miss Kale grading papers at home and hosting the editors of the student newspaper in front of the fire in her living room.
Two of the pictures also include an elderly man, who may have been her father; she was about 40 at the time.
“Miss Norma Kale. . . greeting some of her students who have come to her home on a Sunday afternoon.”
I like the old concrete and wire fence and gate too. It looks like the posts go up to support an arbor over the gate.
Sadly, an In Memoriam page in the 1956 Woodrow Wilson yearbook said that Miss Kale had died in March of that year. It noted that “Miss Kale placed importance on nature and the worth of human character, rather than on material possessions.”
. . . I love
this garden in all its moods,
even under its winter coat
of salt hay, or now,
in October, more than
half gone over: here
a rose, there a clump
of aconite. . . .— James Schuyler, from “Korean mums“
enclos*ure 