History Old Photo's

The Halfway House on the Mount Washington Carriage Road in New Hampshire, c.1870s.
Image courtesy of the Mount Washington Auto Road.
Thanks to Lost New England Blog.

Boiling down sorghum at the Stooksberry homestead near Andersonville, Tennessee, 1933. Photo by Tennessee Valley Authority.

Louisiana, Missouri, spring 1914.
The little shanty boat rocked gently against the muddy bank just below the iron railroad bridge. It was hardly bigger than a good-sized wagon—walls of weathered planks and tar paper, a tin stovepipe poking crookedly from the roof, and a patched canvas awning over the stern where the family cooked and lived most of their days. Painted in faded letters on the side was the name River Queen, though she looked more like a tired old workhorse than royalty.
Captain of this floating home was Silas McCoy, a lean, sun-browned fisherman of thirty-eight. Barefoot in faded overalls, he sat on an upturned crate mending a hoop net, his hands moving with the patient rhythm of a man who had done this since he was a boy. Beside him, his wife Lottie stirred a pot of catfish stew over a small coal stove, her hair tied back with a strip of calico. Their three children completed the crew: twelve-year-old Elias, already strong enough to help haul nets; nine-year-old Clara, barefoot and quick as a minnow; and little four-year-old Jesse, who spent most of his time perched on the roof watching the big trains rumble across the bridge overhead.
Life on the River Queen was simple and hard. Every morning before dawn Silas and Elias would row out in the skiff to run their trotlines and check the nets. The Mississippi gave them catfish, drum, and the occasional sturgeon, which they sold to the fish houses in Louisiana or traded for flour, coffee, and kerosene. In good weeks they made enough to eat. In bad weeks they ate anyway—river water, wild greens, and whatever the Lord provided.
Lottie kept the boat as clean as any cabin on shore. She scrubbed the narrow deck with river sand, hung laundry on lines strung between poles, and taught the children their letters from a battered McGuffey reader when the weather kept them tied up. At night, after supper, the family would sit under the stars while Silas played soft notes on a mouth harp. The whistle of a passing steamboat or the distant thunder of a freight train on the bridge became their lullabies.
The river was both provider and threat. They had seen it rise in angry floods that forced them to tie higher in the trees, and they had watched it freeze solid in bitter winters. But it was home. No landlord, no factory whistle, no crowded city streets. Just the endless brown water sliding south toward St. Louis and eventually the Gulf, carrying driftwood, dreams, and the occasional body from upriver.
On this warm April afternoon, a light breeze pushed small waves against the hull. Clara dangled her feet in the water while Jesse tried to skip stones. Elias proudly showed his father a fat channel cat he had pulled from the net. Lottie laughed at something Silas said—rare, easy laughter that carried across the water.
For a moment the whole family was together on their tiny kingdom of planks and tar, moving with the river instead of fighting it. Far above them, the steel girders of the railroad bridge hummed as another train rolled north toward Hannibal. The children waved at the engineer, who answered with a long, friendly whistle.
In 1914 the world onshore was rushing toward automobiles and electric lights. But out here on the Mississippi, time still moved at the speed of the current. Silas McCoy and his family asked for little—just enough fish to fill the pot, a dry place to sleep, and the freedom to drift when the spirit moved them.
Tomorrow they would lift anchor and ease a few miles downstream to new fishing grounds. Tonight they would eat stew, listen to the river, and rest easy under the same wide sky that had watched keelboats and steamboats and now these last wandering shanty families.
The Mississippi kept rolling, and the River Queen rolled with it—small, stubborn, and free.

People called her Miss Morgan.

And Miss Morgan was just five feet tall, slender, dressed in drab, fragile looking. There was something Quakerish about her people said.

When she spoke, she did so softly. But “when she issued orders it was with the finality of a Marine drill sergeant.”

Miss Morgan was Julia Morgan. And Julia was an architect. One who graduated from U.C. Berkeley with a degree in Civil Engineering in 1894. One who waited for two years for admission into the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris because of her gender. And then became the first woman to graduate. And then she became the first woman to be registered as an architect in California.

In 1904, Julia opened her own architectural firm. Where she shared profits with her workers. And where her career lasted 42 years. Over which she designed about 790 structures, including Hearst Castle.

Williamina Fleming was in her early 20s, a recent immigrant to the U.S. from Scotland, and pregnant when her husband left her.

Responsible to raise their son, she took a job as a housekeeper in the home of Edward Pickering, who was the Director of Harvard College Observatory.

As the story goes, one day when frustrated with the men he employed, Edward yelled out that “My Scottish maid could do better!”

While said in jest, there was much truth to his comment.
Williamina was an advanced student while in Scotland. She was a pupil-teacher by the time she was 14 years old and continued to teach for five years until she married.

In 1881, Edward hired Williamina as the first of what would become a famous group of Harvard Computers. All women, they studied the stars through glass plate photographs. Then only a few years later, Williamina became curator of astronomical photographs. This role came with the responsibility of managing a dozen women computers.

Williamina went on to discover many stars and receive numerous awards and honors.

Apr 9, 1902
"The Girl Who Discovered Her Mother Had a Second Name No One Had Ever Used and Asked Her About It the Night Before She Died"
She had found the marriage certificate in the tin box while looking for the rent document, which was the kind of accidental discovery that changes the shape of something you thought you knew. Her mother's name on the certificate was not the name she had been called her whole life — there was a second name, a first name, sitting before the familiar middle name that everyone used, a name she had never heard spoken, never seen written, never known existed in the five letters that preceded everything she knew her mother to be.
Her mother was dying. This was the context that the discovery arrived in — her mother had been in the bed for two weeks with the illness that the doctor had been honest about in the way doctors are honest when they have decided honesty serves better than hope. She had two weeks, perhaps three. She was seventy-one and she was tired in the deep way of someone who has been alive long enough to be genuinely ready, which her daughter respected and mourned simultaneously. She had two weeks, perhaps three, and she had a name her daughter had not known and the questions were arriving at the exact moment the time for asking them was almost gone.
She asked her the night before she died. She had been going to ask earlier and had not found the right moment, which was its own form of cowardice she acknowledged and accepted, and then the right moment was the evening of the eighth of April when her mother was more alert than she had been in several days and they were sitting together in the lamplight with the particular quality of presence that comes near the end — everything unnecessary stripped away, everything remaining weighted with finality. She took her mother's hand and she said: I found the marriage certificate. I saw your first name. I didn't know you had another name. Why did no one ever call you by it?
Her mother was quiet for a moment and then she smiled — not the polite smile or the managing smile but the real one, the one that went all the way up. She said: my mother named me for her own mother, who she had loved above everything. She said: but when I was born my father took one look at me and said that name doesn't suit her at all and he called me by my middle name from the first day and the first name was never used again. She paused. She said: I have always liked knowing it was there. It was my grandmother's name. It connected me to someone I never met. She paused again. She said: I'm glad you found it. I thought it might go with me without anyone knowing it had been there.
She said the name aloud for the first time — her mother's first name, the grandmother's name, the name that had been in the tin box and on the certificate and in her mother's private knowledge for seventy-one years. Her mother closed her eyes when she heard it. She said: yes. That's it. She said: it's beautiful. Her mother said: she was beautiful, my grandmother. I never met her. My mother said she had a particular way of walking into a room that made everyone in it feel they had been waiting for her. She paused. She said: I always liked thinking I had her name. That something of her was in me that way. She died the following morning. Her daughter had the name engraved on the stone — both names, the known and the unknown, side by side for the first time, the way they had always been in the tin box and never been in the world.

She had set his place because her children expected it and because she herself needed it, needed the specific act of laying the fork and the knife and the glass in the positions he would have recognized, needed to do for him the thing she had done every day of their twelve years of marriage, which was to set a place, which was to say in the language of tables: you belong here, there is a place for you, this is yours. He was in France and the letter she had written him for Christmas was somewhere between her hand and his and might reach him by New Year if the postal systems were cooperating, which they sometimes were not.
The children were seven and five and three and they understood Christmas with the uncomplicated enthusiasm of children who have not yet experienced Christmas as something that can also be sad, who still live in a version of it that is only and entirely full of good things. She was grateful for their version. She moved through the day inside it, borrowing its fullness, letting their happiness be a room she could stand in rather than outside. She sang the songs. She did the things that Christmas required. She held the three-year-old in her lap for most of the afternoon because the three-year-old allowed this and because she needed to hold something.
She had heard, two days before Christmas, that the Henderson boy from the next farm had been killed. She had known him since he was born. His mother was her closest neighbor and had come to her door on the twenty-third with a face that made her open the door wide without waiting to be asked and bring her inside and sit with her for the afternoon, not trying to help in any way that could not help but simply being there, in the room, warm. She had walked home in the evening thinking about randomness — about the fact that the letter she had sent her husband for Christmas was somewhere between her hand and his and that she did not know what the twenty-sixth would bring.
He came home in April 1916 with the cough and the rearranged eyes that she had been warned to expect and did not, quite, know how to receive until she received them, which was with her arms and without words because words were insufficient and arms were what she had. She told him about the Christmas table — about his place, about the fork and knife, about the three-year-old in her lap. He was quiet for a while. He said: I want to see the table. She set it for dinner that evening and he sat in his chair and looked at his place setting for a moment before he picked up his fork, the way someone looks at something they were not certain they would see again. Then he ate. The children talked the whole time. The table held them all.
She set his place for every Christmas for the next forty-one years until he died, and then for the Christmas after that too, by habit — set it before she realized what she was doing, stood with the fork in her hand looking at the empty chair that was empty differently now, permanently now, and felt the specific vertigo of a gesture that has outlived its original reason and found a new one. She set it anyway. Her children, watching from the doorway, said nothing. They understood. They had grown up at that table. They knew what the empty chair meant when someone was coming back and what it meant when they were not. In their mother's hands, setting a place had always meant the same thing either way: you belong here, there is a place for you, this is yours.

In 1876, Blanche Monnier was known as the most beautiful girl in Poitiers. At 25, she fell in love with a lawyer her aristocratic mother, Louise, deemed unworthy.

Her family did not argue. They locked her away.

For 25 years, Blanche lived in a tiny attic room with shutters nailed shut. Her mother told neighbors she had gone mad and then erased her name from conversation.

On May 23, 1901, Paris police received an anonymous letter. When they forced the door, the stench was unbearable. On a straw mattress lay a woman weighing barely 25 kilograms, her hair matted to her knees, surrounded by filth. She was 52 years old.

It was Blanche.

She was carried out into the light for the first time in a quarter of a century. Her mother was arrested and died two weeks later. Her brother Marcel was sentenced to 15 months, then acquitted on appeal.

Blanche never recovered. She spent her remaining years in a psychiatric hospital in Blois, where she died on October 13, 1913, twelve years after her rescue.

Her mother thought honor could be locked in a room. It couldn't.

Hulda Warren Bump—known to audiences as Minnie Warren—was born in 1849 in Middleborough, Massachusetts, at a time when difference often drew stares before applause. She had proportional dwarfism, but those who expected her to shrink beneath society’s narrow expectations quickly learned otherwise. Lively, witty, and musically gifted, Minnie possessed a stage presence that outshone her small frame. Alongside her older sister, Lavinia Warren, she stepped into the world of traveling exhibitions and grand circus tents, transforming public curiosity into performance. Where others saw novelty, Minnie saw opportunity—and she met it with confidence.

Under the management of P. T. Barnum, Minnie’s singing voice became her signature. Audiences who arrived out of intrigue often stayed for her talent. She performed with theatrical flair, warmth, and poise, proving that artistry—not spectacle—was her true calling card. The circus world was demanding: endless travel, bright lights, and constant scrutiny. Yet Minnie navigated it with resilience, asserting her individuality in a culture that frequently blurred the line between entertainment and exhibition. Her marriage in 1863 to Charles Stratton, famously known as General Tom Thumb, drew international attention, linking her story to one of the most talked-about unions of the era and further anchoring her place in 19th-century popular culture.

Minnie’s life was brief—she died in 1878 at just twenty-nine—but it was far from small. She carved out space for herself on stages across continents, challenging assumptions simply by standing in the spotlight and letting her voice rise. In a century that often measured worth by rigid standards, she insisted on being seen as a performer, a sister, a wife, and above all, a vibrant human being. Her story lingers not as a curiosity, but as a testament to talent meeting courage head-on—and winning

Grantville, Coweta County, Georgia, between 1905 and 1908...

Caption
Jim Gilbert (far left) and workers gather for this group photograph outside the cotton gin he owned...

Source
Georgia Archives