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May 1938. "Southeast Missouri Farms. Son of sharecropper washing hands." Our title for this photo comes from the things in this photo. Medium format negative by Russell Lee for the Farm Security Administration. View full size.
The kitchen may be filthy but those pots and pans sure are glistening. They're in better shape than mine are!
Southeast Missouri Farms was a Farm Security Administration project that provided housing and land for 100 sharecropper families. Russell Lee took a number of pictures there in May 1938, when the houses were relatively new. (I used to think they were built in 1937, but they may have been new in 1938.)
Jane Adams, a professor at Southern Illinois University, and her husband D. Gorton, took photos of some of the remaining houses in 2005-2006. After some work, I found a mirror of Adams' original pages at SIU, including the pictures of a few houses and the cotton gin at Southeast Missouri Farms.
(My previous complaint about SIU is partly rescinded; either SIU or archive.org has changed enough that archive.org has parts of the orignal SIU pages available. Googling those SIU URLs led me to the mirror linked above.)
we wouldn’t want to spread germs around.
Always wanted to use my tea kettle more than just for boiling water.
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