The nine children of John and Minnie Wright, standing beside the family’s house on Goltra Road in Albany, summer 1927. Names and ages, from left: Ann (20), Earl (16), Mina (11), Lloyd (22), John (12), Irvine (25), Lee (9), Ed (19), Harold (14).

Judging from the clothes, this photo was probably taken later the same day as the picnic at Waterloo Park (yesterday’s PotD), which occurred in the summer of 1927. Dad and Uncle Irvine worked the wheat harvest in the Palouse (eastern Washington) starting late that summer–meaning, as nearly as I can tell, starting in late July or early August.

The previous Fall, 1926, Dad and Uncle Irvine had worked the apple harvest in Hood River. Dad mentions that they came home from Hood River by way of Seattle to visit Auntie Hawkins (their grandmother Wright’s sister, who had been living with Uncle Richard, or perhaps vice versa). Dad mentions visiting Auntie Hawkins, but not Uncle Richard, so perhaps Richard had already moved to Los Angeles by this time. (His wife Edith had passed away in 1924.) After visiting Auntie Hawkins in Seattle, they went to Hoquiam to visit cousin LeRoy and his wife Ann. He doesn’t mention visiting Uncle Will and Aunt Emma at this time, but it seems likely that they would have. One wonders whether this visit by Dad and Uncle Irvine prompted Uncle Will and Aunt Emma to drive to Oregon the following Fall for the visit shown in the Waterloo Park photo.

The family moved to Jefferson from Goltra Road later this year. The Goltra farm had been acquired in 1924–somehow in trade for the homestead in Alberta. Once Grandpa wrapped up things on the homestead and moved to Oregon for good (which I think was in 1926), he must have realized that he couldn’t, or didn’t want to run the Goltra farm himself. (Dad had been running it from the time they moved there, but made it a point to absent himself when Grandpa moved in for good because he “didn’t relish” the prospect of working with his father. I think perhaps he realized later that the father who returned from Alberta was not the same father he had known when they were living there. Nevertheless, even under the best of conditions, Dad’s and Grandpa’s approaches to work would inevitably have clashed.) Whatever the case, in 1927 Grandpa traded the Goltra farm for the house in Jefferson and 10 acres of land in Sheridan. (I don’t know what became of the land in Sheridan. I presume it was sold at some point.) To the best of my knowledge, Grandpa didn’t ever work again. He essentially “retired” when they moved to Jefferson, and lived the rest of his life on a pension he got for being a Spanish-American War veteran. He was 53 years old when they moved.