Bohemia Historical Society
812 Locust Avenue
One house, photographed twice, about 120 years apart
Somebody stood in the sand road in front of 812 Locust Avenue, sometime around the turn of the last century, and asked the whole household to hold still.
They mostly did. A man in a three-piece suit and a woman in a long dark dress stand together on the porch, framed by the columns, in the formal center of the picture. Everyone else is scattered across the yard with whatever they’d been playing with when the photographer arrived — a girl with a wheelbarrow, another perched on a small wagon, a boy on a bicycle that looks a size too big for him, two more children at the right with a second wagon between them. Nobody was asked to put their toys away. That’s what makes the photo worth looking at.
c. 1900
Reading the Photograph
Look past the family and you can read the place. The house is clad head to toe in wood shingle, unpainted and weathering the way shingle does. There’s an outbuilding to the left, and behind it a smaller shingled barn or carriage house. Young fruit trees, staked and thin, stand in what is clearly a working yard rather than a lawn. The road is sand. There is no pavement, no curb, no utility pole in the frame.
Today
The House Is Still There
Drive that stretch of Locust Avenue today and you pass it without a second glance. It has been painted, re-sided, and added to, and the yard around it has been a lawn for longer than anyone now living has been looking at it. But the house in the old photograph did not come down.
The Changes
What Changed
The most obvious change is the skin. The shingles are gone, replaced by painted clapboard with dark green shutters at every window. In the peak of the front gable, the small glazed attic window has become a round louvered vent with a decorative surround. The porch roof sits lower and flatter than the steeper hip in the old photograph, and a one-story wing now extends off the left side.
What the house lost, mostly, is texture. The weathered shingle that made the whole elevation read as one soft surface is now flat painted board, and the shadows fall differently because of it. It is the same change that came to most of the older houses on this end of the hamlet, and for the same reasons: shingle is expensive to keep, and paint is easier than replacement.
The Evidence
What Didn’t
The bones are the argument. Count the second-floor openings in either photograph and you get the same rhythm: one window, then a tight pair, then one more. Look under the porch roof and the arrangement repeats — a window, the front door, then two windows to the right. The front gable rises from the same point in the roof, with an opening at its peak in both. The wraparound porch is still a wraparound porch, still carried on round columns, still turning the corner in the same place.
The Legacy
Still on Locust Avenue
Around it, everything else moved on. The sand road is asphalt with a power line running over it. The fruit trees are mature hardwoods. The outbuildings are gone from view. The working yard became a lawn.
The children in the first photograph would be long gone. The house they were photographed in front of is still standing on Locust Avenue, still with a porch big enough for the whole family.
Do you know this family, or when the photograph was taken? The Society would like to hear from you