The August 15th PotD was of the five older Wright siblings standing in front of the sod house in Alberta in about 1913. At that time, I wrote that it was the only photo of the Wright children on the homestead in Alberta that I knew of. Well, guess what turned up in Dad’s photo album? Two more photos taken in Alberta. These were taken in 1921 or 1922, so not too long before Grandma and the kids left for the US.
The first photo is of the two girls in the family, Ann and Mina. In 1921, Ann would have been 14 and Mina would have been 5.
The second photo is of the three youngest, Lee, Mina and John, aged about 3, 5 and 6 respectively in 1921.
I believe what is in the background of both photos is the “frame house” that was built in 1918 (finally) to replace the sod house. Dad remarked at how much colder the frame house was in the winter compared to the sod house. (He tells of how water dripped on the floor would turn to ice in the night.) A frame house probably would have been colder even under the best of circumstances, since the walls of the sod house were one foot thick solid material and I imagine this was before there was any practical form of insulation for the walls of a frame house. Nevertheless, I look at the way he exterior walls of the frame house were built–just boards side-by-side, nailed to a frame, many of them cracked on the ends or worse. It appears that the boards have shrunk as they dried out (as would be expected), leaving noticeable gaps between the boards. No paint, no effort to fill the gaps with something. One hopes there was at least tar paper or something similar underneath the boards. No wonder the house was cold in the winter! It would be interesting to know whether this was typical of frame house construction on the plains of Alberta at that time. It’s probably not a fair comparison, but I look at houses built in Albany around the same time, and they certainly don’t look like the frame house in these pictures.
The third photo is one Art took in 1958 (just 36 or 37 years after the other photos were taken) showing what remained of the frame house at that time: just a hole in the ground where the cellar was.
