The Children’s Hour
When the daughters of James A. Drake were born, in the 1880’s, Queen Victoria was on the throne of England, and she and her brood of nine were the first family to the world at large. A fond mama who is said to have filled a hundred and ten albums with family photographs, she has survived in our memories as a ruler with very strict ideas about how people should comport themselves. In her long shadow the Drakes were raised to be as foursquare as the mounting block little Dort and her aunt Harriet Cole are standing on (opposite) in front of Grandfather Walker’s house in Corning, New York. But by the time Dort had become the Gibson girl at right, the family of Teddy Roosevelt dominated the popular imagination. His six children, all distinct characters, were encouraged in their antics by the President, who joined them in romps, pillow and water fights, wrestling, and hikes. “For unflagging interest and enjoyment,” he said, “a household of children, if things go reasonably well, certainly makes all other forms of success and achievement lose their importance by comparison.” There were still families who needed children’s economic contributions on the farm or in factories and worked their offspring as though they were grim little grownups. However, increasingly prosperous middle-class families were finding more and more time to devote to child rearing. Along with the usual cautions about propriety, gentility, and obedience, deportment books began to include sections on children’s parties and instructive play. It is this spirit of pleasant ferment and change that Isabel Drake captured on film and exemplified in her own life: respect for each child’s personality and the solidity of family life. Many of her photos were developed and printed at home on blueprint paper, and it is this nostalgic blue that we have tried to suggest in the present selection.
—Suzanne Smith
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Out on the Old Front Porch
Few of the Drakes’ contemporaries had summer homes, but virtually everyone who had a house had a porch, and that is where middle-class America spent the summer. On the porch, which often ran around three sides of the house, the men could sit in shirt sleeves through the hot evenings while the family-played Parcheesi, listened to patter songs on the gramophone, and watched the occasional water wagon trundling by, laying the dust on the street. The Drakes spent their summers at Keuka Lake, but here, too, the porch was the focus of their lives; it was there that the piano was installed, along with the aquarium and the parrot. Today people are demolishing the porches that were built on their homes during the second half of the nineteenth century, thereby restoring the original architectural form of the houses but at the same time sacrificing one of the greatest pleasures of summer.
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Left to Their Own Devices
There can be no question of Martha Drake’s pride in her splendidly furnished Victorian nursery (opposite). Martha’s childhood coincided with the apogee of the American dollhouse. She has two of them, as well as a china tea set, a tea table, and a miniature bed. The trolley is obviously a homemade vehicle and must have been a pallid source of amusement compared with Laurita, the parrot. But, for all these wonders, there are days when everything palls, even at Grandfather’s (center); across the lawn and the ages comes the cry “What can I do now?”
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The Long Summer
The life of the Drake girls—and of most families at the turn of the century—was distinguished by the commanding presence of Father. There he is at left center, opposite, with three daughters aboard. Mr. Drake was often away on business trips, and therefore he entrusted his daughters’ minds to the bearded fellow at the blackboard. Professor John C. Bostlemann not only gave the girls their elementary education but taught each a stringed instrument as well. Playing the viola was a pleasant enough occupation, no doubt, but not a patch on looking at chickens at Grandfather’s farm, going swimming, or—as on the pages following—trying to coax an elaborate tricycle into motion or listening to Grandmother Walker read about how pluck and luck helped some enterprising lad to become President of the Company. The pace of life has accelerated in our era, and it seems doubtful if children will ever again have such eternities of what is now disapprovingly referred to as “unstructured time” to fill. The books will be put away, the summer house boarded up, and the children on these pages will grow up to face the assorted horrors the new century has in store for them. Here, however, they are content to dawdle happily in the long afternoon of the nineteenth century.
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