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| Family with board and batten house. Olivia Colony, Texas |
UPDATE ALERT 2/3/2016
This post has been substantially revised. Please go to Charles and Wilhelmina Johnson pose with their children. C. Johnson (see his/her comments below) has been able to provide identifications for the family and place. Thus correcting the date on this photo, solving other mysteries and providing accurate information correcting some other posts (for instance Ellen Cavallin is really Jenny Johnson!) Our family photographers made prints of their photos and gave them to the families. So today, several more have "popped up".
Original post follows:
This house appears to be the same house as the pictured in two earlier posts ("Water, Water, Everywhere" and "Ellen Cavallin Peterson..." ) Like other houses in the Olivia Colony, Texas pictures it has the typical board and batten siding and the open foundation. In this picture, the house appears newly built, with no landscaping. Based on that, and on the style of clothing of the people in the picture, I’m dating this picture to circa 1895.
This post has been substantially revised. Please go to Charles and Wilhelmina Johnson pose with their children. C. Johnson (see his/her comments below) has been able to provide identifications for the family and place. Thus correcting the date on this photo, solving other mysteries and providing accurate information correcting some other posts (for instance Ellen Cavallin is really Jenny Johnson!) Our family photographers made prints of their photos and gave them to the families. So today, several more have "popped up".
Original post follows:
This house appears to be the same house as the pictured in two earlier posts ("Water, Water, Everywhere" and "Ellen Cavallin Peterson..." ) Like other houses in the Olivia Colony, Texas pictures it has the typical board and batten siding and the open foundation. In this picture, the house appears newly built, with no landscaping. Based on that, and on the style of clothing of the people in the picture, I’m dating this picture to circa 1895.
I’ve been waiting to post this picture thinking that I might be able
to identify the people, but have not yet been able to do so.
Familiar and yet unidentified people are threads that run through my Olivia
pictures. People re-occur, sit, stand, work, go to church, with other people in
other pictures (both my own and those found in other sources.) They are a “community”: friends, relatives,
neighbors, visitors. I know that I have read their names – in the census, in
the records of Eden Church, in the book, Svenskarne i Texas. But, in this case
(as in many others), I have not yet put the names with the faces.
One final note: when I refer to “Olivia”, I am talking about
the area between Lavaca, Kellers and Carancahua Bays that was the early Olivia
Colony. This was not a “little town” but
a larger rural area including the area north of the present day Olivia. This is the area shown on the 1941 map "Wells of the Olivia Area" on the “maps”
page.
Identifiers:
Negative #: paulson064
Photographer: Paulson/Swenson Family
Place: Olivia Colony, Calhoun County, Texas
Date: circa 1895
This is the Charles (Carl) Otto Johnson family home, it was located on your map of Calhoun County showing water wells - it was located on that map just south of well 81, about halfway between 81 and 63 roughly. It was demolished around 1976, I was little then but remember watching my great uncle tear it down and it made me quite sad. It underwent a lot of changes in its 90 plus years of existence, all but three of their children were born in that house and at times it is where they were sent home with funeral services as well. The Johnson family from left to right in the photograph: standing in the grass is Oscar Johnson (my grandfather) b 1895, his sister Almina (called Minnie) on the step b 1898, their papa Carl b 1863 and the mother of the family Wilhelmina (also called Minnie) b 1867, little Knut Walford b1900), standing in the grass is Eva Maria (called Marie) b 1893 and above to her right is their eldest living child Jennie Christine b 1890. Their youngest child Ellen Eveline will be born in 1906 and is not in the photo, Knut looks to be about 3 or 4 so I believe this photo was probably taken around 1904. We have a copy of this photo in our family photos as a post card of the image. Thank you so much for posting this, it is so much clearer than the post card we have.
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