By her left arm appears to be an animal trap hanging from a chain, probably used to catch nuisance raccoons and possums.
The can with a spout by her foot would be kerosene for oil lamps maybe starting the stove.
You can tell it’s laundry day because the wash tub is by the door. The tall oblong pot on the stove is probably a “boiler” which was used to heat large volumes of water on a woodstove without taking up all the cooking surface. This would be water for laundry, canning, or bathing. The paddle (“wash stick”) in the pot suggests maybe it had been used to wash clothes. Usually they are a bit more tub shaped and are most commonly seen today as fireplace accessories to hold kindling. The dents along the top edges suggests copper construction, which was common for boilers. The use of wash tubs and boiler is described here - sounds like brutal work!
Before washing machines, houses with plumbing and hot water had that big double basin “laundry sink” in the basement. The fancy ones even had the washboard molded into the sink! Tres chic!
Nobody thinks poverty is a good situation to be in, but there can be a camaraderie when everyone has to rely on each other to make ends meet, or you have to use your imagination and effort to bring some beauty into your world, rather than just buying something. I don’t think you have to be romantic or ignore the fact that life was really difficult (edit: or brush over the causes of the poverty) to be able to appreciate the good things about a poor childhood.
I bet even with what they had that kitchen turned out some damn tasty food.
My parents grew up a little better, all be it 20 years later, than that. They didn’t have running water as kids, just the old bucket and well on the side of the house. A wood stove for cooking of course, but they were farmers so all the fresh fruit, veggies, and milk you could want. Of course it’s not like life wasn’t constant hard work. They’ve told me stories about it all growing up and some of it is romanticized and other parts they couldn’t be paid enough to go back and do.
I found this catalogue for the Auto Stove Works from that same year on Archive.org. Looks to me like that might be the model on page 20, or some older version of same.
Can we have a discussion without going postal? I grew up poor but not poverty stricken. Of course diverse personalities deal with hardships differently. Some find happiness and keep their feelings of self worth intact. Others are surrounded in misery. Family and the surrounding community have the biggest impact on how a child perceives her situation in life. This little girl had someone who took the time to decorate an otherwise dreary hovel to make everyone in the house happy. I get that and passed no judgement.
That said, for accuracy in rural poverty and how it really was for millions of Americans I wouldn’t go to LIW. It was written for children’s sensiblities, after all. Check out James Agee’s “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men” with photos by Walker Evans. A beautifully written essay on rural poverty during the 1930’s.
Pictures like these remind me of my grandmother’s stories of growing up poor in Toronto. One winter, during a coal strike, everyone in the neighbourhood would sneak over to a nearby racetrack and steal boards from the fence. It was the only way to keep warm…
Can we discuss what is hanging in the upper right portion of the photograph? Is that an aviators cap? Would be another interesting layer to the story behind this photo if it is.
OFFS - just putting the judgemental comment about the scalloped paper being ‘heartbreaking’ into another perspective, think you are the one overreacting - and i am VERY familiar with James Agee’s “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men”, Walker Evans and the entire FSA group of photographers. LIW is an extremely true to life memoir of the poverty, pain, and hardship of PIONEERING ans WESTWARD EXPANSION (from the perspective of child and young woman and is NOTHING like the ridiculous TV show of the same name) - never made the claim that it was representative of rural poverty at the time the photo was taken.
My Mother grew up a child of Dust Bowl. With her mom as a seamstress and dad a barber.
When the depression hit they lived in a tent and survived only because it Oklahoma and the oil men where there and they weren’t farmers. But the farmers left and their biz dried up and eventually went to a tent city for a while.
She, as a child of 8 would sell pencils and apples going to the office buildings of the oil men and then take her nickles and see an all day movie. (several, Tarzan, flash gordon, other serial movies of day).
Even after she got married and met my father; she never really thought of herself as ‘poor’ in her childhood and only seemed to remember the good times and even simple things and talked on and on about how wonderful it was make popcorn balls for Christmas; talking about games they played with jump rope, making kites and things that cost nothing.
Re: Kites…there’s a reason old people save string.
This isn’t to say its completely Romanticized and some other needs, need to be taken care of food/water/shelter/health. As older people without younger children had it very, very bad…much like today.
Lots of memories flooding back. Garfield, AR, my father’s hometown. Pop. 67 it said on the sign entering, although I was always confused as to where the other 47 to 55 or so people were. The picture tells me that my dad was not bad off since Gramma lived in a solid one story house with a large garden in back. Lucy (whom I was related to in some very complicated way) had the General Store a few blocks away which was also her home. The store comprised the front part with the parlour in back along with a good sized kitchen to the side. The bedrooms were down narrow, incredibly steep stairs. The neat thing was, you passed the root cellar on the way down to the bedrooms, where there was yet actually a back door (Ozarks, ya know?). Beautiful country, especially in the fall.
I didn’t say the scalloped newspaper was heartbreaking. I remember reading it earlier, though. I think whoever wrote it deleted it.I said it showed someone cared enough to take the time to add it as decoration.
I went back and read the opening for the photo. It was Mark Frauenfelder (of BB fame and submitter of the photo) who described the scalloped newspaper as "heartbreaking’.
“Refer to Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans for more photographs of poverty in America ca. 1930’s.”
Both of these are also more privileged people looking IN on the poor and controlling that narrative to sell their images to richer people.
Both of them were accused of this by some of their subjects. I often think of this, a poem also by some one who actually was a child of poverty:
“childhood remembrances are always a drag
if you’re Black
you always remember things like living in Woodlawn
with no inside toilet
and if you become famous or something
they never talk about how happy you were to have
your mother
all to yourself and
how good the water felt when you got your bath
from one of those
big tubs that folk in chicago barbecue in
and somehow when you talk about home
it never gets across how much you
understood their feelings
as the whole family attended meetings about Hollydale
and even though you remember
your biographers never understand
your father’s pain as he sells his stock
and another dream goes
And though you’re poor it isn’t poverty that
concerns you
and though they fought a lot
it isn’t your father’s drinking that makes any difference
but only that everybody is together and you
and your sister have happy birthdays and very good
Christmases
and I really hope no white person ever has cause
to write about me
because they never understand
Black love is Black wealth and they’ll
probably talk about my hard childhood
and never understand that
all the while I was quite happy”
I need a lesson in how to convert a New York Times article into a JPG format. But, bear with me. If you have the time read "Of Poor Farmers and “Famous Men” by Lawrence Downes, NYT Sunday Review, Nov. 26, 2011. Downes traveled to Alabama to the places Agee and Evans wrote about and photographed. He interviewed an old timer who knew people in Evans’ photos. The kids grew up and the old man tells the stories of what became of them.
You can down play the text and photos of LUNPFM and call the two elitists but they brought the images of poverty into the comfortable homes of the people who I hope were moved by them enough to look at poverty in a different way and not in the Puritanical sense that people are poor because they are doing something wrong in God’s eyes, a concept BTW that still has much sway in right wing circles.
Perhaps it would help you some if I told you that misery and happiness can coexist.
Poor people are psychologically complex, often intelligent, and basically just like the rest of the human population.
Let’s not romanticize it, but let’s not fetishize the suffering either. It feeds the lie that if some one is ever happy they aren’t being abused or neglected, for instance.
