Tree-Lined Gravel Drive to Victorian Farmhouse, New England, 1950s

Archive & AtlasEstablished · MMXXIII

Tree-Lined Gravel Drive to Victorian Farmhouse, New England, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

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Tree-Lined Gravel Drive to Victorian Farmhouse, New England, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

Unattributed 1950–1959

AA-2026-846135

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Someone stood at the foot of this gravel drive in the 1950s and took a picture of a house they clearly thought deserved to be documented, which is what people did before they had any other way of telling someone the property existed. The house at the end — a late-Victorian two-and-a-half-storey with a pediment over the front door and a dormer pushing through the roofline — had been built at a moment when American families believed that enough architectural detail applied to a farmhouse would confer the dignity of a gentleman's estate. By the 1950s the trees planted to flank that effect had grown tall enough to nearly swallow the house, which is either the plan working exactly as intended or the plan working forty years past its useful life. The grass on either side of the drive is the particular shade of unkempt that suggests a property between owners, between seasons, or between one era's maintenance standards and the next. Whoever stood here with a camera believed they were capturing a house; what they actually captured was the moment trees win.

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