Sometime around 1907, my father's family posed in front of their rural, North Carolina cabin, dressed in their best, for a portrait by a photographer, almost certainly an itinerant, traveling the countryside by horse and wagon. On the right stands my grandfather, named for the Antebellum Massachusetts Senator, Daniel Webster, holding a rifle and posing with his horse. Standing to his right, in the middle, is my grandmother, known to all as Miss Betty. Between them stand my uncles, Martin and Charlie. In the middle, in front of my grandmother, are my aunts, Mateye and Lulabelle. The smallest boy, to my grandmother's right, is my father, with his brother, Dan on his right. I can't identify with any certainty the sister on the far left. All told, Webb and Miss Betty had two more sons and two more daughters. I don't know the horse's name, either.
As I have posted recently, my spouse and are are planning to relocate soon after retirement next year to a newly green home in a 100+ yo residential historic preservation district. Anticipating that, as we prepare our present home for market, things we had forgot we had keep turning up, including the fuzzy image above. It particularly caught my attention that the people in the photograph occupied their charming rural cabin at the same time that a new American middle class was living a very different sort of life in the neighborhood to which my spouse and I now intend to move, a thousand miles West of that quaint country abode. Step out into the tall grass for reflections on two very different Americas, as they existed over a century ago, as they illuminate how much change, good or ill, humans are capable of making happen in just two generations.
My father's home at the time of that picture was ignorant of the comforts of plumbing or electricity and lacked a daily connection with the outside world. No doubt Web knew stories of his immigrant grandfather, seventy years before, who came from Spain to start over in North America. Those are forgotten now, save for an oral history of a family connection to Basque country. No doubt his own father had stories to tell of the Civil War, but they are forgotten now, too.
Although his life was rural and largely agricultural, the life lived by my grandfather, Web, nevertheless included aspects of manufacturing and marketing that kept the family supplied with cash income. OK, he grew and dried tobacco and made and bootlegged moonshine. That rifle in his hand, I think, may have peered out at more than one revenuer. Because of that cash, everyone of his eleven children finished high school, in a place and time when that meant sending them off to boarding schools.
The family, however, was by no means middle class, by the standards of the time, despite Webb and Miss Betty's determination to educate and advance their many children. It was left to those children, now they call them the Greatest Generation, to claw their own way into the Middle Class, mostly through military service in World War II, for those who went, and profiting on government contracts, for those who didn't. Some never really made it to the Middle Class.
At the time the photo was taken, about a thousand miles to the West, a thriving city was churning out a brand new American Middle Class of shopkeepers and craftsmen and traders, doctors and lawyers and tailors and factory managers for growing enterprises. These people had families and those families didn't want to live above the store anymore, or in the tenement near the work or office or store. They wanted homes of their own with yards and sidewalks and safe streets and parks and useful shops on every corner. Streetcars and, evermore, automobiles, began to stretch how big a city thought it could be and those who could easily get back and forth wanted to live in the attractive new neighborhoods.
Craftsmen from all over the World responded to the demand, erecting hundreds of brick homes, on new tree lined streets, near the great street car lines. Every house had electricity and plumbing and furnaces. Every corner was built out for storefronts. After about 60 years the quality and size of the homes brought the neighborhood veneration as a historical district. The neighborhood was created for and engendered a totally different life than my father's family could have known in rural North Carolina.
As a result, the new Middle Class in that new city neighborhood had a totally different outlook than my grandfather, Web. They read the newspaper, everyday, maybe several of them. Their life included entertainment and restaurants and clubs and music. They were modern compared to the very ancient agrarian lifestyle my father's family lived in the rural South. The homes they built for their families represent a significant historical epoch. Conserving this kind of neighborhood doesn't just help preserve that history; it fights back against urban sprawl and leapfrog development while permitting green updates to improve the sustainability of life in the neighborhoods.
So, it comes around that I am poised to help preserve the historic nature of an area where, when it was built, my father's family couldn't ever have dreamed of living. The original post on our green historic preservation project received a lot of encouragements to provide updates on our project as things progress. We have a meeting next week that may mark a major milestone in that, which I will post about.
I am confident grandfather Web never gave any thought to the the effect on climate of the pinewood fire under his still or that heated his tobacco shed and his cabin. But that sort of concern is just about all I can think about as I look at the project confronting me. The rehabilitation or manufacturing and construction of a home leaves a pretty big carbon footprint and the vacant land available for infill construction in a historic district, usually kept as lawn or garden, is probably greener than having someone live on the plot. That said, if someone is to live there, let it be with as small a carbon footprint as possible given reasonably accessible technology, considering the legitimate imperative of preserving the historic character of the neighborhood.
But grandfather Webb lived in a less informed era. His idea of a city was turn of the century New Bern, NC. Just two generations separate me from that uninformed pine-burning, liquor running, rural freeholder. Most people know that many or more generations of their own family. Two generations, I figure, is about how long humans have to sort out this climate change problem, if it isn't already too late. I think my own kids' generation may start to figure it out and it will be their adult kids who do or don't make it. I'm rooting for them and everyone else trying to make a difference. Ultimately, largely, I believe that the change we need will occur one human life at a time. In retirement, we hope to live two of those lives.