Sign, Sign, Everywhere a Sign
“No Gas” Signs Were a Common Sight in Oregon During the Fall of 1973, Such as at This Station in Lincoln City Along the Coast. Many Stations Closed Earlier, Opened Later and Shut Down on the Weekends
October 1973
National Archives
Environmental Protection Agency Project DOCUMERICA
Exit78 photo series: Sign, Sign, Everywhere a Sign (003)
Sign, Sign, Everywhere a Sign
Rockville Fair, Maryland, 1928.
Retrieved from the Library of Congress, www.loc.gov/pictures/item/npc2008013854/.
(Accessed September 01, 2016.)
Exit78 photo series: Sign, Sign, Everywhere a Sign (002)
Dust storm near Williston, North Dakota; October 1937; photo by Russell Lee; Library of Congress image
Dust bowl farmer raising fence to keep it from being buried under drifting sand. Cimarron County, Oklahoma; April 1936; photo by Arthur Rothstein; Library of Congress image.
Liberal (vicinity), Kan. Soil blown by dust bowl winds piled up in large drifts on a farm; March 1936; photo by Arthur Rothstein; Library of Congress image.
I realized a few days ago that the 15th year anniversary of the September 11th attacks was approaching and started looking at – and saving – images from then that are in the public domain. I initially had no plan on what to do with them until yesterday, when I decided to do a short video.
Much has happened in the years since the planes flew into the World Trade Center. The world seems far different, with terror attacks occurring all too frequently around the world, terror attacks that gain little or nothing for those who plot and plan them.
The first several images are from several years to a month before the attack. They simply show New York City with the twin towers still standing.
The music track used is “September 11, 2001 – Theme from the Last Castle” by Jerry Goldsmith. According to YouTube, videos using this track are viewable everywhere except Germany.
Image used in this video are public domain, accessed from the Library of Congress or the U.S. National Archives. Images are viewable in a Flickr album at https://www.flickr.com/photos/exit78/albums/72157672313859131.
Sign, Sign, Everywhere a Sign
Somewhere in the middle of the country where gas rationing hasn’t hit yet
September 1942,
Office of War Information photo by Ann Rosener
Exit78 photo series: Sign, Sign, Everywhere a Sign (001)
random topic 001 (continued)
About 4 1/2 months after the October 2013 release of the movie 12 Years A Slave, an article in Vanity Fair describes writer Katie Calautti’s attempt to determine the fate of the real Patsey, learning “just how impossible it can be to find one woman when that woman was a slave.” After working for more than two months to find an answer, in the end, Patsey’s question of “What’ll become of me” remained unanswered.
Calautti writes:
I have scoured annotated versions of Northup’s text, census records, court documents, online genealogy databases, libraries, and newspapers from the era. I’ve spoken with experts in the fields of genealogy and historical research, consulted professors, archivists and historians, even traveled to the town in Louisiana where Epps’s plantation, once stood—all in an attempt to track Patsey’s life after Northup’s departure in 1853. I practically went cross-eyed after days of squinting at vital records recorded in miniscule cursive writing; I pulled archival books as heavy as small children from high shelves in cavernous, dusty warehouses; I almost hydroplaned into ditches while exploring unpaved backroads during rainstorms. I drove through towns with a Louisiana-history picture book on my lap in an attempt to match the old and new. I hand-cranked microfiche machines until my wrist was so stiff I couldn’t move it. The investigation has unearthed two new theories for every one posed, protruding from the murk of research like so many cypress knees lining Louisiana’s bayous. How can it be this hard to find one woman? The question seems as deceptively simple as Patsey’s, but the difficulty in answering proves emblematic of the lost histories of many slaves.
One contact, historian Meredith Melançon, told Calautti, “If I was Patsey and I survived to emancipation, I’d get the heck outta this place—as far away from Edwin Epps as possible.”
The biggest discovery of Calautti’s research was a an 1895 clipping from the “Idaho Register” where a veteran’s recollection told of Northern soldiers recounting a visit to the Epps plantation.
Soon after the war, I met a number of returned soldiers who were with Banks on his Red river expedition, who told be of having read the book at the time it was published (in 1854), and who had visited the plantation of Edwin Epps, where Northup, or Platt, as he was known as a slave, passed years of his life. They told me of seeing and talking with his former slave comrades, whose names were Uncle Abram, Wiley, Aunt Phoebe, Patsy, Bob, Henry, and Edward.
Calautti, though, identifies problems with this evidence. It was recounted 30 years after it happened. It may have been that the soldiers told him they had talked to some of the slaves and the narrator referenced his copy of Northup’s book to cite the names of all of Epps’s slaves. Patsey might have left by then or she might have died.
It seems, however, based on a letter by a Captain Devendorf to the Mexico Independent newspaper, that Patsey was alive as late as June 1863 and had left the plantation, going away with the union army.
Excerpt from a letter to “Nell” by Capt. Devendorf; Headquarters 110th Reg’t N.Y.S.V., Alexandria, La, May 11, 1863; published in the Mexico Independent, Mexico, N.Y. Thursday, June 18, 1863:
Now for a little item that will be of interest to you. One night before halting, I went on about two miles ahead to look out a camping place. I came to a bridge across the bayou, at a good point, as I supposed, for supplies, on which stood a couple of negroes. I asked one of them, about 30 years old, dressed up pretty well, with a nice silk hat on, what his name was. He answered Bob. “Who do you live with?” “Master Epes” Bob and Epes: Solomon Northrup immediately occurred to me, and I asked him if he ever knew a slave by the name of Platt. “ Oh! golly, yes, master!” said he “He raised me. I guess I does know him. He came to our camp at night and proved to be the veritable Bob of Solomon Northrup celebrity, and Massa Epes the same master, and we were then on his plantation, the same that Solomon had worked on so many years ago. I tried to get Bob to go with me, he being an intelligent darkey; but he would no on account of his mother, whom, he said, he must now stay with and support. I found on inquiry among the negroes about that Platt was a very popular darkey among them; also that his story was true. Patsey went away with our army last week, so she is at last far from the caprices of her jealous mistress.
It seems that Patsey had survived until the Union troops came through and, then, emancipated, did exactly what Meredith Melançon suggested, got “the heck outta this place!”
Interior of wood shack built upon Ford truck chassis housing father, mother and seven children. This view shows the mother and two of her children. They were found on U.S. Route 70, between Bruceton and Camden, Tennessee, near Tennessee River. Carl Mydans (photographer) March 1936
I’ve published 4 other posts using Mydans’ photos of this family:
The only information about this family I have been able find online is in the captions for the images at the Library of Congress:
Resettlement official investigating case of nine living in field on U.S. Route 70 between Camden and Bruceton, Tennessee, near Tennessee River.
Three of the family of nine living in field in rough board covering built on old Ford truck chassis on U.S. Route 70, between Camden and Bruceton, Tennessee. Their water supply was an open creek running near state highway.
Twelve-year old girl of family of nine living in one-room hut built over the chassis of abandoned Ford truck in open field on U.S. Route 70 between Camden and Bruceton, Tennessee. Near backward Tennessee section. View also shows one of the small boys in family; the girl is dressed in a meal sack.
One-room hut housing family of nine built over chassis of abandoned Ford in open field between Camden and Bruceton, Tennessee, near Tennessee River.
Mother and baby of family of nine living in field on U.S. Route 70 in Tennessee, near Tennessee River
After adding the images from the Library of Congress, I continued searching online for additional information. While I didn’t find any new facts about the family or their situation, I did discover two additional images in The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Photography Collection, The New York Public Library Digital Collections.
Illiterate father of seven children living with his family (9 of them) in open field in rough board covering built on old Ford truck chassis on U.S. Route 70, between Bruceton and Camden, Tennessee. Their water supply was an open creek running near highway.
Mother and father and several children of a family of nine living in open field in rough board covering built on old Ford chassis on U.S. Route 70, between Bruceton and Camden, Tennessee. Their water supply was an open creek running near highway.
The Bitter Years, in 1962, was Edward Steichen’s last exhibition as Director of the Department of Photography at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). The images in the exhibition were personally selected by Steichen from 270,000 photos taken for the Farm Security Administration by a team of photographers employed between 1935 and 1941 to document (primarily) rural America during the Great Depression.
random topic 001 (continued)
In Twelve Years a Slave, after the severe flogging of the slave Patsey and how it affected her afterward, Solomon Northup writes of the slaves’ perception of “freedom” and the effects brutality imparted on slaves had the households of the slave-holders.
It is a mistaken opinion that prevails in some quarters, that the slave does not understand the term — does not comprehend the idea of freedom. Even on Bayou Bœuf, where I conceive slavery exists in its most abject and cruel form —where it exhibits features altogether unknown in more northern States — the most ignorant of them generally know full well its meaning. They understand the privileges and exemptions that belong to it —that it would bestow upon them the fruits of their own labors, and that it would secure to them the enjoyment of domestic happiness. They do not fail to observe the difference between their own condition and the meanest white man’s, and to realize the injustice of the laws which place it in his power not only to appropriate the profits of their industry, but to subject them to unmerited and unprovoked punishment, without remedy, or the right to resist, or to remonstrate.
Patsey’s life, especially after her whipping, was one long dream of liberty. Far away, to her fancy an immeasurable distance, she knew there was a land of freedom. A thousand times she had heard that somewhere in the distant North there were no slaves —no masters. In her imagination it was an enchanted region, the Paradise of the earth. To dwell where the black man may work for himself—live in his own cabin —till his own soil, was a blissful dream of Patsey’s —a dream, alas! the fulfillment of which she can never realize.
The effect of these exhibitions of brutality on the household of the slave-holder, is apparent. Epps’ oldest son is an intelligent lad of ten or twelve years of age. It is pitiable, sometimes, to see him chastising, for instance, the venerable Uncle Abram. He will call the old man to account, and if in his childish judgment it is necessary, sentence him to a certain number of lashes, which he proceeds to inflict with much gravity and deliberation. Mounted on his pony, he often rides into the field with his whip, playing the overseer, greatly to his father’s delight. Without discrimination, at such times, he applies the rawhide, urging the slaves forward with shouts, and occasional expressions of profanity, while the old man laughs, and commends him as a thorough-going boy.
“The child is father to the man,” and with such training, whatever may be his natural disposition, it cannot well be otherwise than that, on arriving at maturity, the sufferings and miseries of the slave will be looked upon with entire indifference. The influence of the iniquitous system necessarily fosters an unfeeling and cruel spirit, even in the bosoms of those who, among their equals, are regarded as humane and generous.
Young Master Epps possessed some noble qualities, yet no process of reasoning could lead him to comprehend, that in the eye of the Almighty there is no distinction of color. He looked upon the black man simply as an animal, differing in no respect from any other animal, save in the gift of speech and the possession of somewhat higher instincts, and, therefore, the more valuable. To work like his father’s mules — to be whipped and kicked and scourged through life — to address the white man with hat in hand, and eyes bent servilely on the earth, in his mind, was the natural and proper destiny of the slave. Brought up with such ideas —in the notion that we stand without the pale of humanity — no wonder the oppressors of my people are a pitiless and unrelenting race.
Dorothea Lange’s photo, below, an Oklahoma family struggling in California in 1939 was #009 of the images in my Eyes of the Great Depression series. In updating that post, I found more information taken from caption cards filed with other images.
Brawley, Imperial Valley. In Farm Security Administration (FSA) migratory labor camp. Family of mother, father and eleven children, originally from near Mangrum, Oklahoma, where he had been tenant farmer. Came to California in 1936 after the drought. Since then has been traveling from crop to crop in California, following the harvest. Six of the children attend school wherever the family stops long enough. Five older children work along with the father and mother. February 23, two of the family have been lucky and “got a place” (a day’s work) in the peas on the Sinclair ranch. Father had earned about one dollar and seventy-three cents for ten-hour day. Oldest daughter had earned one dollar and twenty-five cents. From these earnings had to provide their transportation to the fields twenty miles away. Mother wants to return to Oklahoma, father unwilling.She says, “I want to go back to where we can live happy, live decent, and grow what we eat.” He says, “We can’t go the way I am now. We’ve got nothing in the world to farm with. I made my mistake when I came out here.”
Migrant Family During Pea Harvest products from Exit78 at zazzle.com
Woman of the High Plains, “If You Die, You’re Dead –That’s All.”1
It was June 1938. Nettie Featherson was 40 and the mother of three sons when Dorothea Lange, a documentary photographer for the Farm Security Administration, ambled up to “Murray’s Place” near Carey in western Childress county. Inconspicuously, Lange snapped a series of black-and-white shots and handed two nickels to Nettie’s son, Ken. At 45, he still recalls the silver bonanza the photographer brought to the dusty North Texas farm more than 40 years ago. But Lange took back something of her own from the encounter with the Featherstons – a poignant series of photographs depicting a melancholy determined woman wearing a coarse cotton dress… The photographs remain a stark evidence of the poverty Nettie Featherston and thousands of other Americans endured between 1929 and 1948. They tell a story of resolve and perseverance, of survival. Until this year (1979), Nettie Featherston had no knowledge of her fame as the unidentified subject in Lange’s photograph, “Woman of the Plains.” 2
Dorothea Lange’s photos of Elmore City, Oklahoma, native Nettie Featherston were part of the Farm Security Administration’s (FSA) extensive documentation of depression-era, rural America. Lange liked one photo so much that it was included in a series of 15 women in a book called The American Country Woman (1967). The portrait of each woman was paired with an image from their environment. The photograph’s title comes from a larger caption that recorded a conversation between Lange and Featherston, “We made good money pullin’ bolls [cotton], when we could pull. But we’ve had no work since March. When we miss, we set and eat just the same. The worst thing we did was when we sold the car, but we had to sell it to eat, and now we can’t get away from here. We’d like to starve if it hadn’t been for what my sister in Enid sent me. When it snowed last April we had to burn beans to keep warm. You can’t get no relief here until you’ve lived here a year. This county’s a hard county. They won’t help bury you here. If you die, you’re dead, that’s all.”3
Nettie Featherston, with her firm, lined face, slender body, and wind-blown hair, is known to thousands as the subject of “Woman of the Plains,” a series of photographs taken by Dorothea Lange in 1938 as part of the Farm Security Administration’s study of migrant farm workers. The Nebraska State Historical Society has been searching for the people in those pictures to find out how they fared since the Depression, and when the Childress Index reprinted Lange’s series, three people recognized the woman and directed the researchers to her. The 81-year-old widow, who lives alone in Lubbock, had no trouble recalling the back-breaking days in the thirties when her family picked cotton fourteen hours a day. One thing she can’t remember is Dorothea Lange. “You can tell from those pictures how played out I was,” she said, a bit sadly. “But my son – he’s 45 now – he remembers, ‘cause the lady gave him two nickels to keep, and his daddy gave him little tobacco sack to put ‘em in. He was so proud.” 4
Nettie Featherston in the four-room house she shares with her son. Lubbock, Texas. August 1979. 5
“We were on the road, just trying to find some thing [for a job]. We stopped at a filling station in Carey [Texas], and this cotton grower come by and seen our bedding on top of the car. He asked if weʼd like to go out and pull some bolls [harvest the cotton] for him. We did that all that winter. After that we had to wait for chopping time [in the summer]. My brother went back to Childress and played dominoes. Thatʼs the way we lived, from what he made playing dominoes. “We lived in a little two-room house. Had a wood stove that we cooked blackeye peas on. We ate so many blackeye peas that I never wanted to see another blackeye pea. We even slept on ʼem, laid out pallets on the pods of blackeye peas and hay. Your kids would cry for something to eat and you couldnʼt get it. I just prayed and prayed and prayed all the time that God would take care of us and not let my children starve. All our people left here. They live in California. But we were so poor that we couldnʼt have went to California or nowhere else. “I never much thought about ever living this long [81 years]. I just didnʼt think weʼd survive. If you want to know something, weʼre not living much better now than we did then – as high as everything is. “I remember those times and it seems like Iʼm not satisfied. I have too much on my mind. It seems like I have more temptations put on me than anyone, to see if youʼre able to bear them or not. And every time I ask God to remove this awful burden off my heart, He does.” 6
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Nettie Featherston is #005 in the Eyes of the Great Depression series.
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(Blast from the Past – Iconic images of Woman of the High Plains have already appeared twice on Exit78, one of which was in this post, originally from April 2013. She also appeared in The Bitter Years, Edward Steichen’s last exhibition as Director of the Department of Photography at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). I am working my way through the images from that exhibition and have brought this post forward to be reposted at the same time as Wife of a Migratory Laborer with 3 Children – The Bitter Years 004.)
Woman of the High Plains products from Exit78 at zazzle.com
