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November 1938. "Shack of day laborer who works in sugarcane fields near New Iberia. He comes from a parish in northern Louisiana." 35mm nitrate negative by Russell Lee for the Farm Security Administration. View full size.
I was recently reading an article on the sawmill towns of western Louisiana. A large part of the article was devoted to the types of company housing used in the towns.
One type of housing used in the temporary logging camps [called "front camps"] was a simple shack, or series of shacks, mounted on railroad flat cars, to provide accomodations for the workers in the camps. The shacks would simply be wheeled into place on the company rail line and then withdrawn to the next location once all the timber had been cut out.
Looks like this might have been one of those "mobile homes" left over from the sawmill days, since by 1938 most of the western Louisiana timber lands were a wasteland of cut-over stumps.
The laundry's dryin' on the fence, Dave.
[Comment Czar - not Dave, btw - acknowledges your observation, but speculates our fellow may have separated out his whites and still needs to do his union suit.]
Seeing the washboard in this picture makes me wonder if there isn't a guitar just inside the door ready for an impromptu tune.
[More likely some dirty laundry.]
When I was 10 years old, this would have been just the kind of clubhouse / tree house that my friends and I would have loved to have built from scrap lumber, if only our parents would have let us construct it in the back yard.
A set-up for a Laurel & Hardy gag if I ever saw one.
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