“M. Laing reading on porch at Bala, July 29, 1925,” via The Globe and Mail Collections (1266, item 5873), City of Toronto Archives.
‘Bala’ is probably Bala, Ontario, a summer cottage community north of Toronto.
Tag: screened porch
The Sunday porch: Paradise Valley
Ranch House with Porch, Paradise Valley, Humboldt County, Nevada, July 1978, (35mm slide) by Suzi Jones, via American Folklife Center of the Library of Congress (all photos here).
The house — of adobe construction — served as the officer’s quarters of Fort Scott in the late 1860s. In 1978, it was the main residence of Fort Scott Ranch.
There is another view here, by Howard W. Marshall.
The photos here are three of over two thousand taken or collected for the Folklife Center’s 1972-1982 ethnographic field project on the Paradise Valley area. The work became the collection* “Bucharoos in Paradise: Ranching Culture in Northern Nevada, 1945-1982.”
There’s another photo of the ranch house and its outbuildings here.
Poll results
For the last two Sundays, I ran a little poll asking how readers look at enclos*ure — 1) on a desktop computer or Mac; 2) on an e-reader; or 3) on a smartphone? Of those who responded, 82% use a desktop and the others use an e-reader.
*It also contains sound recordings and motion picture film.
The Sunday porch: Mechanicsville, Md.
Mr. and Mrs. Herbert on their porch in Mechanicsville, Maryland, June or July 1942, by Marjory Collins, via Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division (all three photos).
All the elements of a good screened porch are here: a slipcovered glider and a wicker chair, a rocker with a cushion (because the caned seat is nearly gone), a Boston fern and an angel-wing begonia, a newspaper and a copy of Good Housekeeping. Both Herberts are wearing summertime white shoes.
Only a little iced tea could make it any nicer. Judging from the way they are dressed, I would guess this is a Sunday afternoon.
The couple — Charles P. and Bessie D. — built their Queen Anne house in 1909, although, curiously, it appears that they only bought the land beneath it in 1914, according to a Maryland Historic Sites Inventory Form filled out in the 1990s or later.
Charles had moved to the the area to be an express agent for the railroad. Bessie was the town dressmaker. They lived in the house until their deaths during the 1960s.
A photo attached to the Inventory Form shows that the screening on the east side of the porch was later removed and some lacy trim was added along the entire front. I could not find the house in a current Google Maps satellite view, however.
As usual, I wish we could see more of the garden.
Marjory Collins took these pictures about six months after moving to Washington, D.C., to join the documentary photographers of the U.S. Office of War Information. Her “upbeat, harmonious images” of that time “reflected the OWI editorial requests for visual stories about the ideal American way of life,” according to a biographical essay about her by the Library of Congress.
The Sunday porch: Delta Farm
The front porch of a Delta Farm home, Hillhouse, [Bolivar County,] Mississippi,” June 1937, by Dorothea Lange, via Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division (all photos here).
Delta Cooperative Farm was a privately owned and administered agricultural resettlement project for white and African-American sharecroppers evicted in the mid-1930s.
Founded in 1936 by several religious thinkers, educators, and organizers — including well-known missionary author Sherwood Eddy, who had $20,000 to spend from a follower — the enterprise avowed a commitment to economic equality among the races.
Over half of the first group of 31 farmers to settle at Delta were Black. All members worked together to grow cotton and cut and mill the land’s cypress timber. All of them shared in the first year’s profits: $327 per family.
The farm’s small houses had the same simple plan and amenities — “Screen windows and porches are uncommon in cotton cabins,” noted Lange — but they were segregated in two rows: one white, one African-American, separated by a road. And the children attended segregated schools.
All the families shared the produce of a 10-acre vegetable garden, however, which appears in the photos above to have engulfed the cabins.
And they all used the farm’s clinic, nursery, and library and attended the integrated cooperative meetings. There had to be at least two Black members on the five-person farm council.
At the start of World War II, the project lost members to wartime industry jobs and military enlistment, and, in 1942, the land was sold.
Four years before, in 1938, the Delta trustees had established a second inter-racial farm project in Mississippi — Providence Cooperative Farm in Holmes County. It operated until 1955, when its staff and residents fled after being threatened by the white citizens of nearby Tchula. The empty land was sold the following year.
You can read a more complete story of the two visionary cooperative farms here.
The Sunday porch: Miss Kale’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 