Caroline Atwater

Photograph: Caroline Atwater standing in the kitchen door of her double one and a half story log house.
Orange County, North Carolina, July 1939.
By Dorothea Lange

Source: LOC
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Most of the photographs that Dorothea Lange took during her "make-work" trip to North Carolina in the summer of 1939 showed sharecrop and tenant farms.*

However, on July 1st, in a location not far from Chapel Hill, North Carolina, she visited a small holding that was owned and farmed by a man and wife, both African American.

As on other visits, she was accompanied by an academic researcher, Margaret Jarman Hagood.

The photo captions and field notes given with the photographs were prepared by both women. They all come from the Farm Security Administration Collection in LC's Prints and Photos Division.

In their general notes of the visit, Lange and Hagood prepared the following description:
Ernest and Caroline Atwater bought the house and one acre of land 30 years ago. Atwater had been working on the railroad and saved up the money.

The house has never been mortgaged except once when they [had] to borrow on it to buy a mule. A few years later they bought two more acres.
They now raise no cash crop on their three acres, only potatoes, corn, peas, etc.

They have “what you call a plug mule.” They sell a little produce and sometimes canned berries.

No children live with them now and their children do not send them any money although they often send clothes and presents.
[The house is] a double cabin, one and a half story, log house. Yard — shows the care contrasting owners’ from tenants’ yards.

Narrative source: Daring to look: Dorothea Lange’s photographs and reports from the field by Anne Whiston Spirn (University of Chicago Press, 2008)