“American Group Portrait,” ca. 1910, unknown location and photographer, via Museum of Photographic Arts Commons on flickr.
I suspect that this is the (semi-circular) porch of a boarding house and that the people are the residents and owners/employees.
Click on the image to enlarge it.
Happy 2018 to you all!
A repeat post from September 2013. . .
“Jorena Pettway and her daughter making [a] chair cover out of bleached flour sacks and flower decorations from paper. She also made the chairs and practically all the furniture in the house.”*
The photo was taken in Gee’s Bend [Boykin], Alabama, 1939, by Marion Post Wolcott, via Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.
Gee’s Bend is an African-American community located in a large bend of the Alabama River. It became famous about 15 years ago for its remarkable quilts.
In 1816, Joseph Gee brought slaves to the area and started a cotton plantation, which was sold in 1845 to the Pettway family. After the Civil War, the farm’s freed slaves remained on the land as sharecroppers, and many took the last name of Pettway.
In the winter of 1932-33, the community’s particular isolation — with only a small ferry to the east and a bad road to the west — and its dire poverty came to the attention of the Red Cross, which sent it a boatload of flour and meal. It began receiving Resettlement Agency assistance in 1935, and the Agency purchased the plantation in 1937. By 1939, when the Farm Security Administration sent Wolcott to take photos, there had been a number of improvements, including new homes (like the one pictured above).
In 1962, when residents began trying to register to vote, the local government eliminated the ferry service, which connected Gee’s Bend to the county seat of Camden. Without it, people of the community had to drive more than an hour to reach the town. The ferry service remained closed until 2006.
In 2002, an exhibition of quilts made by the women of Gee’s Bend opened at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston and then traveled to the Whitney Museum in New York City. Another show in Houston and at the Smithsonian Institution followed in 2006. The New York Times art critic, Michael Kimmelman, called the quilts on display “some of the most miraculous works of modern art America has produced.”
*Library of Congress caption, possibly written by Wolcott.
Harriet Beecher Stowe, her husband, and guests on the porch of her home in Mandarin (Jacksonville), Florida, 1875, via Robert N. Dennis Collection of Stereoscopic Views, The New York Public Library Digital Collections. (Click on the image for a larger view.)
The author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and 30 other books bought her Florida house soon after the Civil War ended. At the time of this photo, she was there seeking refuge from the publicity accompanying the civil trial for adultery of her equally famous preacher brother, Henry Ward Beecher.
There is another view of the house (no longer standing) here.
East Bolton Street, Victorian Historic District, Savannah, Georgia, 1979, by Walter Smalling for an Historic American Building Survey (HABS), via Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.
Interesting porch columns. . . . It appears, from Google Satellite, that the house is still standing.
“Unidentified Garden in Long Island, New York,” 1930, a hand-colored glass lantern slide by an unknown photographer, via Archives of American Gardens, J. Horace McFarland Company Collection, Smithsonian Institution (used by permission).
Thoughts of summer. . . we woke up to snow this morning in Stuttgart.
The Archives of American Gardens holds over 60,000 photos and records documenting 6,300 historic and contemporary American gardens. Among them are over 3,100 black and white photographs and 445 glass lantern slides from the J. Horace McFarland Company, from the years 1900 to 1962. The firm printed nursery catalogs, horticultural books, and trade publications.
McFarland was an author and horticulturist, as well as a publisher. He also became an important proponent of environmental conservation and the City Beautiful movement.
enclos*ure 