AA-2026-BF1119
On the image
Someone built this cottage the way a great many people did in the 1950s: small, square, and just finished enough to argue it was a real house rather than a shed with ambitions. The screened porch tacked onto the side was the era's compromise between wanting fresh air and not wanting the mosquitoes that came with it, and the single power line strung in from the road announces that this patch of hayfield had only recently joined the twentieth century.
One folding chair sits angled toward the field, as if someone had worked out exactly where the evening light would fall and positioned themselves accordingly. It is a chair set up for a view that is, strictly speaking, just more field, but rural leisure in this period did not require much scenery to justify sitting still in it.
A single evergreen sapling has been planted a few feet off the porch steps, staked to nothing, trusting entirely to time. Whoever put it there was making a long bet on a short vacation house, the kind of quiet optimism that assumes the tree, the cottage, and the owner will all still be around to see how it turns out.
The historian's note
Modest single-story cottages of this type proliferated across rural North America in the years following the Second World War, as families with new automobiles and new leisure time built simple retreats on inexpensive farmland or lakeside lots. The screened porch, asphalt shingle roof, and clapboard siding shown here are standard features of catalog-built or owner-built vacation cottages from the period, often constructed with plans purchased through lumber yards or mail-order building supply companies.
The utility pole and meter box indicate that rural electrification, expanded significantly under federal programs beginning in the 1930s, had reached this property by the 1950s, a marker of infrastructure that transformed what a modest cottage could offer in terms of comfort and function.
Structures like this one were rarely individually documented, making surviving images a useful record of vernacular postwar leisure architecture and the modest scale at which most American families experienced the era's growing prosperity.
Subjects & keywords — each links to a search
Visually related — by likeness
Summer Cottage and Folding Chair at Field's Edge, 1950s. 1950–1959. Archive & Atlas, Historical Image Library, AA-2026-BF1119. https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/summer-cottage-and-folding-chair-at-field-s-edge-1950s.
@misc{aaAA2026BF1119,
title = {Summer Cottage and Folding Chair at Field's Edge, 1950s},
year = {1950–1959},
howpublished = {Archive \& Atlas, Historical Image Library},
note = {Accession AA-2026-BF1119},
url = {https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/summer-cottage-and-folding-chair-at-field-s-edge-1950s}
}TY - ART TI - Summer Cottage and Folding Chair at Field's Edge, 1950s PY - 1950–1959 PB - Archive & Atlas, Historical Image Library AN - AA-2026-BF1119 UR - https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/summer-cottage-and-folding-chair-at-field-s-edge-1950s ER -
From the community
Identifications, corrections, and discussion from readers — reviewed by a librarian before appearing here.
Sign in to add an identification, correction, or comment.
No notes yet — be the first to add what you know about this image.