Gardenbloggers, like me, are always on the look-out for new stories, and any connection to plants or gardening will do. So when I came across 1942 photos of Greenbelt’s original community gardens in the Library of Congress archives, I naturally blogged about them, asking readers to comment on the clothing choices on display here. The photos were taken in June, on presumably a hot day, but still, no worries about sunburn, ticks, or mosquitos? Must be nice.

Above, the text accompanying one of the photos tells us that the gardeners are tenants, that they all received a 50-foot plot and that it cost the gardeners $1 to have their plot plowed.

I learned more about Greenbelt’s first community gardens from the current Greenbelt Community Garden Club website, which nicely acknowledges the 80-year history and provides an update:

In the early years, 300 allotment gardens were located in five areas on the edge of town. During World War II, 350 people planted victory gardens in Greenbelt. Today, roughly 78 plots remain of varying sizes.

Gardening in Greenbelt has always been popular but a renaissance movement has sprouted up in recent years in support of self-sufficiency and eating seasonally to improve health through local, organic farming and sustainable agriculture. [The community garden club’s] mission is to promote gardening in the community. To stimulate, foster and share knowledge of gardening techniques and sustainable practices and to promote a love a gardening among amateurs.

Photojournalist Marjory Collins

But things got even more interesting for me when I researched the photographer and discovered a pioneer in photography, and a very rare female one – Marjory Collins.  And what a bio! From wealth to left-wing activist, and I lost track of her divorces!

Marjory Collins described herself as a “rebel looking for a cause.” She began her photojournalism career in New York City in the 1930s by working for such magazines as PM and U.S. Camera. At a time when relatively few women were full-time magazine photographers, such major photo agencies as Black Star, Associated Press, PIX, and Time, Inc., all represented her work.

In 1941, Collins joined Roy Stryker’s team of photographers at the U.S. Office of War Information to document home front activities during World War II. She created remarkable visual stories of small town life, ethnic communities, and women war workers. The more than 3,000 images she took in 1942-43 are preserved in the Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection at the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division. Source.

After the war Collins went on to cover the world as a photographer, writer and editor, primarily covering civil rights, the Vietnam War and women’s movements. I’m especially drawn to this detail: “Collins was very active politically; a feminist, she founded the journal Prime Time (1971–76) “for the liberation of women in the prime of life.”

Above are examples of Collins’ home-life photos for the Office of War Information, taken in the D.C. area, where she lived while on assignment for the War Department in 1941-2. Unlike her photos of Greenbelt, these include African-Americans.

Works from her long career are available here to see and even download, and here are the 248 photos found by searching “Greenbelt” in the collection, documentary gems of small town life during World War II.  Some of the photos are well known to us, but most I had never seen before. They’re all in the public domain, free to use for any noncommercial purpose (like this nonprofit blog.)

Note the choices Collins made in her visits to Greenbelt in 1942, five years after the original residents moved in and established the new town. She seems to have come here in May, for a Memorial Day celebration, and again in June, when she shot the community gardens. Her other subjects included fishing at the lake, visits to the dentist, the city pool, grocery store,and family life, both indoors and out. Greenbelt is referred to throughout as a “federal housing project.”

Here are some of my favorites:

Captions identify the senior program, including its “grand march.”

Captions identify the Greenbelt, Maryland swimming pool, where “bathers pay admittance according to age. Season tickets are obtainable by families.” And “A constant stream of water runs down the swimming pool slide.”
Captions identify “Mr. and Mrs. Leslie Atkins, Ann, and Pierce Atkins having supper,” Mrs. Atkins “reading a story before bedtime,” “Ann and Pierce (three years old) Atkins taking a bath together.” Sourced from the Library of Congress. View public domain image source here.

There’s even a front view of the kids in the tub, which I doubt would be done today. Times have changed.

Doesn’t the “Mother and Child” statue look massive in these early shots? Note that the plinth it’s mounted on includes a water fountain.

Here we see Roosevelt Center half-built.

Home Life Photos as War Propaganda

What surprised me most was learning the purpose of the photos – not to document history or even to provide jobs for photographers during a recession. Nope. The assignment was to shore up support for the war effort and to showcase American life to our enemies. And indeed, the ones in Greenbelt document a very happy segment of American life. These are the lucky pioneers who’d been chosen to live in the new utopian experiment called Greenbelt.

Better known among War Department photographers working in the ’40s is Gordon Parks, whose works are on display through tomorrow (Jan 12) at the National Gallery of Art.

New Deal Photographers

You’ve probably heard of the earlier photographers hired during the Depression, like Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange. I wonder if there are other times in history when the federal government has hired photographers to document American life. What a gift to history, and to admirers of documentary photography.