This photo shows the house on Goltra Road where the John E. Wright family lived and farmed from 1924-1927. The house is on the east side of Goltra Road just south of Midway Road, on the southeast outskirts of Albany. This picture was taken in the summer of 1927. I’m reasonably sure Dad took this picture and the second one below, of the kids.

If you look at the outbuilding to the right of the house (kind of behind the car), the tall shrub covering the left part of it, and the lower shrub to the right of the tall one, I think you’ll be able to match those up with the same vegetation in the picture of the nine siblings and the picture of Grandma and Grandpa (the last two PotDs).

The house, the outbuilding to the right, and the barn behind the gate all still stand today. Here is a Google StreetView look at that house in 2018 (click/tap the image for a possibly newer and certainly more responsive view). Possibly the barn was rebuilt on the same location, but the house and outbuilding are just as they were 90 years ago.

I’ve already told you how this property was acquired (Dad’s recollection, anyway) and how it was then traded for the house in Jefferson.

The photo below shows Mina, Lee and John (L-R) in June 1927 holding their pets. You can see right where it was taken by comparing with the first picture of the house. This photo is a little out of focus, unfortunately, but still a cute one of the three kids. In this photo, the same outbuilding is in the right part of that picture. And there, just to the right of John, you can even see the plant that was in front of the siblings and in front of Grandma and Grandpa in those pictures, though it isn’t really clear.

If the siblings picture and parents picture were taken after the picnic, late in the day, that location would be a good place to take them, since that side of the outbuilding faces west.

At Dad’s 90th birthday, Aunt Mina shared a memory of the puppy she is holding in this picture:

I do remember you bringing to the farm at Goltra a darling puppy, a terrier mix, I guess, light tan and white, and after a family conference, you gave the puppy to me, and I named him Prince. He did just fine on the farm, and I loved him, but when we moved to Jefferson there was no fence and he started to roam and eventually disappeared, much to my sorrow.

There was a lot going on in the latter half of 1927 and the exact chronology is a bit unclear. It is further clouded by a notation on one photo of the picnic indicating that it occurred in the fall (when in fact it occurred in the summer). We know the family was still living in Goltra in June, because of the dated picture of the kids. And we now know they were still living in Goltra when the Waterloo picnic happened later that summer. We know that Irvine and Dad worked the wheat harvest in the Palouse starting late that summer. And we know that the family moved to Jefferson before the end of that year.

By the next spring, Dad was working for Peter Zehr, on his farm near where the Mennonite Home is in Albany now.