“Residence with goat in Yew Street, Barcaldine, Queensland,” ca. 1910, photographer unknown, via State Library of Queensland Commons on flickr.
The man and boy are showing off the goat and cart. A woman on the porch is holding up a painting.
In 1891, the Great Shearers Strike was held in Barcaldine under the boughs of The Tree Of Knowledge. The event led to the formation of the Australian Labor Party. The streets in the town are all named after species of trees.
“Gate made from the end of an old bed. Alvin, Wisconsin,” May 1937, by Russell Lee, via Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.
Alvin was named for one of its founders, Alvin Spencer, who had moved his family to the area in 1907.
In order to submit a request for its own Post Office, the little Forrest County community where the Spencers had settled had to have a name. Alvin submitted the name of another community leader, Curtis Powell, for consideration. Curtis submitted his friend Alvin’s name. Since there was already a town named Curtis in the state, the new community was dubbed Alvin, Wisconsin.
I love that they submitted each other’s first names.
“Garden – lot 9, block 11. . . . Garden of $20 a month home,” Fairfield, Alabama, 1917,
via Frank and Frances Carpenter Collection, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.
Fairfield was a planned community built in 1910 for the workers of U.S. Steel’s plants in the Birmingham area. Its (mostly white) residents could either rent or purchase modern houses with indoor plumbing and central heating. There were also parks and playgrounds, churches, a public library, and 30,000 newly planted trees and shrubs.
The photograph is one of over sixteen thousand created or collected by Frank G. Carpenter and his daughter, Frances, to illustrate his geography textbooks and popular travel books.
Little house and garden of a coal miner, Lens, France, May 16, 1920, by Frédéric Gadmer, via Archives of the Planet Collection – Albert Kahn Museum /Département des Hauts-de-Seine (all three photos).
The city of Lens, once home to the Lens Mining Company, was largely destroyed in World War I. The photo above shows post-war temporary workers’ housing.
Avion, just south of Lens, was similarly devastated. The photos above and below show new houses on Rue Pascal on June 14, 1921.
Avion was un coron (a mining village) of the Liévin Company, which had 9,695 employees at the start of WWI.
You can see these homes today here.
These autochromes are three of about seventy-two thousand that were commissioned and then archived by Albert Kahn, a wealthy French banker and pacifist, between 1909 and 1931. Kahn sent thirteen photographers and filmmakers to fifty countries “to fix, once and for all, aspects, practices, and modes of human activity whose fatal disappearance is no longer ‘a matter of time.'”* The resulting collection is called Archives de la Planète and now resides in its own museum at Kahn’s old suburban estate at Boulogne-Billancourt, just west of Paris. Since June 2016, the archive has also been available for viewing online here.
*words of Albert Kahn, 1912. Also, the above photos (A 21 376, A 27 779, A 27 788) are © Collection Archives de la Planète – Musée Albert-Kahn and used under its terms, here.
Interior garden of Abbaye Sainte-Marie, 13th. century cloister, Arles-sur-Tech, France, November 1902, by Eugène Trutat, via Bibliothèque de Toulouse Commons on flickr.
The garden is far more formal now, with a clipped boxwood parterre in a geometric pattern around a fountain. There’s a more recent photo here.
enclos*ure 