This is a portrait of Arthur Blaine McClain.

I imagine it was taken before he was married, so before 1908. Since it was taken in Albany, according to the studio imprint on the photo’s mounting card, …

…it was taken after the Nathan McClain family moved to the Willamette Valley in 1902. I split the difference and assigned an approximate date of 1905. Grandpa Arthur would have turned 21 that year.

I don’t have a clear idea of what Grandpa was doing or where he was living in the years between 1902 when he came to the Valley and 1908 when he married Grandma. I imagine for a time he lived with his parents on the farm they rented in Tallman. But by 1908 he had courted Grandma, who lived in Albany, built a house on Seventh Street, in Albany, and gotten a job at Veal’s Chair Factory, in Albany. (There is a theme here.) To do all those things in Albany, it doesn’t seem as though it would have been workable, given the transportation of the time, for him to be living in Tallman with his parents still. Did he live in a rooming house? Live with friends? Don’t know.

According to Mom’s recollections,

My father built that house [at 1027 E 7th St] when my folks decided to get married.

I don’t know how long it was between when they “decided to get married” and when they actually got married on  January  June 3, 1908. It must have taken Grandpa some months, at least, to build the house, even though it was fairly small. It had a basement, which I imagine he had to dig by hand, so that would have taken some time, too. I suppose that once Grandpa had built enough of the shell of the house, he could have camped out in it while he finished it. His job at the chair factory was a short walk away. But I have no information on where he was living before that point.

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I have gotten some surprised reactions when I say that Great-grandpa and Great-grandma Nathan and Mary McClain rented a farm in Tallman when they first came to the Willamette Valley, so apparently that wasn’t part of the family folklore. I don’t know exactly where the farm was. Unfortunately rural census-takers didn’t make any effort to indicate the locations of the houses they visited. But I do know they were still living in Tallman when the census was taken there in May 1910.

They must have bought the farm in North Albany shortly after that. Mom’s memories of the farm there and especially Thanksgiving dinners there loomed so large that we (or at least I) got the impression her grandparents had lived there for ages. But Nathan and Mary’s time there was really quite short. They moved there after May 1910 and Nathan passed away in May 1919. So less than nine years. Of course those were exactly the years of Mom’s childhood, so for her, they had always lived there.

After Nathan passed away, Mary and the remaining children at home moved into Albany.

I wonder whether Grandpa Arthur’s decision to buy the farm in Tallman in 1917 was just coincidence, or whether it had some connection to his parents having lived in the area until just seven years earlier.

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I have written in passing about the design of Addie McClain’s photo album and the album I’m going through now, how the pages had slots into which photos on cards were to be inserted. There were apparently two standard sizes of cards.

One size was called a “cabinet card” and was 4¼ inches wide by 6½ inches tall, onto which a 4 by 5½ inch photo could be mounted. (This left one inch of space below the photo for the studio imprint on the card.)

A smaller size card was called a “cartes-de-visite” (French for “visiting card” or the more recent usage “business card”). Despite the name, they were larger than a modern-day business card. More like what we would call a “wallet photo” today. The card was 2½ inches wide by 4 inches tall with the photo mounted on it being 1½ by 2 inches.

The photo albums that were designed to hold these cards had some number of pages in the front part of the album (eight to twelve) that would hold a cabinet card on each side of a page. At the back were two pages designed to hold four cartes-de-visite on each side of a page.

The practice of studios mounting photos on these standard card sizes began in in the late 1860s and continued (with changes in card color and style over the years) until around 1920—so basically the Victorian Era.

Evidently there were other card sizes besides these, but these are the sizes these photo albums were intended to hold. Some of the photos in Addie McClain’s photo album are on cards the width of a cabinet card, but two inches taller. They could still be inserted into the cabinet card slot of the album, but they stuck out the bottom, so not ideal.

The photo above of Arthur McClain is on a standard cabinet card.