Past and present
Saturday, 17 May 2008
Is this what they mean by negative space?
We imported a friend to distract us this weekend, and distract us he has!
Late this morning, he and I went to the Southeast Region office of the National Archives and looked at some of the TVA records. When the government ousted all those folks so they could flood their land, they did social work/outreach as part of the resettlement. I looked at case records for some of the 800-odd families who had to move for one reservoir in Alabama, and geeze those folks were poor. For some perspective, a chicken was valued at 50¢ and I saw one mason’s helper made 25¢ per hour; this was in the 1930s.
The photos were all mixed up, and haven’t been indexed, so we couldn’t know where the Alabama ones were in the acid-free archive boxes. Out of the thousands of negatives, we pulled only a few, and as luck would have it, none were from Alabama.
This farm in this lovely valley is in Tennessee, however; the photo was from 1942. It is labeled as the Mack Swann Farm, Jefferson County. Here’s a wee bit about Mack Swann’s wife and her family….
And that excursion was over by 1:30 pm!