The Sunday porch: the Jones

crj00 006Calvert Richard Jones (on the right), with six women, a man, boy, girl and dog, standing and sitting in a colonnaded porch way,” probably Swansea, Wales, ca. 1860, via National Library of Wales Commons on flickr.

Jones was a member of Swansea’s wealthly, landowning elite.  He studied mathematics at Oxford and was ordained as an Anglican priest, but spent much of his time traveling and painting. Like many men and women of his class in the Swansea area from the 1840s to the early 1860s, he was a photography enthusiast. In 1841, he took a daguerreotype that is now the earliest accurately dated photograph in Wales.

The photo may include Mrs. Jones (Portia Smith) and one or more of their three daughters.

The Sunday porch: Pleasant Hill, N.C.

Pleasant Hill, N.C. F.B. Johnston, Library of Congress

Pleasant Hill, Vance County, North Carolina, 1938, by Frances Benjamin Johnston for the Carnegie Survey of the Architecture of the South via Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

Pleasant Hill,cropped, N.C. F.B. Johnston, Library of Congress
Detail of photo above.

The plantation house, later known as Rivenoak, was built sometime between 1750 and 1780 by Philemon Hawkins, Jr.

A 2011 view of the house is here.  Unfortunately the stone columns are gone.