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August 1941. "Mrs. Myrtle Higgins of Leraysville, New York, with some of the belongings she has packed preparing to move out of the area being taken over by the Army. Mrs. Higgins has been selling eggs and berries in the town, and her son added to her $2 a week income by working in a junkyard in Watertown. She is moving to a farm near Mexico, New York." Medium format negative by Jack Delano for the Farm Security Administration. View full size.
I love those dotted-swiss curtains!
It appears that Mrs. Higgins was displaced by a pre-World War Two expansion of the Pine Camp military reservation. It subsequently became Fort Drum, and is still in existence and the home of the 10th Mountain Division.
She really isn’t so old at all. Born in December 1879, she’s my age: 61. (But my yoga teacher, who’s at least a decade older, actually looks younger.)
Take away her granny glasses, granny dress, granny shoes; put on sneakers, a tshirt and ball cap and she looks like someone who could run a yoga studio.
I note an Aladdin Model 11 lamp with an inCREDibly dirty chimney in the centre of the table.
And … isn’t that a Westclox Big Ben mantel alarm clock?
At upper left in the window, a broken window pane, that probably had been given "a lick and a promise" for quite a while, will now never be repaired. Why would she now when the Army will be tearing the house down?
Although she's started, she has a great deal of packing left. From the looks of the top box, she's an expert at doing so. She can take a minute to rest and pose for the photographer.
The "starts" of geraniums and African violets on her window sill garden, will be the last to go.
At Pulaski, Feb. 23. 1967, Mrs. Myrtle S. Higgins, Mannsville, widow of Edwin S. Higgins, aged 88 years. Funeral Saturday, 11 a.m.. Cleveland funeral home, Sandy Creek, Rev. Miles L. Hutchinson, pastor of the Mannsville and Lorraine Methodist churches, officiating. Spring burial in Maplewood cemetery, Mannsville.
Is a gift from God, says the poster to the left
The carbon mantle style kerosene lamps, likely Aladdin here, gave off a remarkable amount of light. Heat too. The one in my aunt and uncle's Wisconsin fishing cabin could also fry some of the mosquitoes that found their way inside through the window screens. The lamp would be surrounded by little vampire corpses after two or three rounds of cribbage.
Along with the spices and hatpins Mrs. Higgins also appeared to have been something of a tacks collector.
Is that the sun shining in, or have they turned a searchlight on this poor lady?
[Photographer Delano believed in good lighting! - Dave]
She's leaving behind a riot of colors and patterns, from the linoleum floor to the oilcloth on the table to the wallpaper to the curtains. I wonder if she decorated her new home the same way, or opted for something calmer.
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