Sepia Saturday: Little Friends

Sepia Saturday challenges bloggers to share family history through old photographs.

This week’s Sepia Saturday photo featuring three children in a field of poppies prompted me to revisit this picture of my uncle Orvin Davis Jr. sharing a seat in a wheelbarrow with a little boy, both being ignored by a little girl. 

Orvin Jr. is in the middle
Shenandoah, VA about 1927

My long-standing question about the identity of these children  – cousins? neighbors? – was rather quickly answered when I noticed the same children appear in another photo that was actually labeled with the children’s names:  Lanier and Louise. 

Lanier, Orvin Jr., and Louise

The possibility that they were cousins was instantly eliminated.  Another clue to their identity was the Davis Store in the background.

Closeup of Davis Store

The store was at the corner of Sixth Street and Pennsylvania Avenue in Shenandoah, Virginia.   The house where Orvin Jr., Lanier, and Louise were playing faced Pennsylvania Avenue.  Based on Orvin Jr’s birth in 1925, the photo was probably taken in 1927, so I looked at both the 1920 and 1930 census records at Ancestry.com for my grandparents who lived on Sixth Street.  Clicking back and forth from the image, I located the families living on Pennsylvania Avenue, but no Lanier and Louise.

Snip of 1930 Shenandoah, Page, Virginia census

Not to be defeated, I searched Ancestry.com entering Lanier, no last name, living in Shenandoah, Virginia in 1930.  And ta da – there he was along with a sister Louise, and his parents Harry and Nelle WADE living on Sixth Street, just a few doors away from the Davis family.  However, I still don’t know whose yard they were playing in because the house was rented in both 1920 and 1930 by different people, so who lived there in 1927 is anyone’s guess.

Lanier and Louise did not remain in Shenandoah very long.  Their father Harry was apparently climbing the corporate ladder in the flour mill business. In 1920, shortly after he married Nelle Snider, he worked in a mill in Rockbridge County.  By 1930, he was superintendent of a flour mill in Shenandoah.  Possibly he worked for Shenandoah Milling Company, a large grain elevator and flour mill.  However, he might as easily have been employed at any number of smaller mills since there seemed to have been a mill on every corner. 

Between 1935 and 1940, the Wades relocated to Huntington, West Virginia, where Harry was “Head Miller” of Gwinn Brothers & Co, the leading merchant millers of grain and hay in the state.  The Wades were finally able to change their status from renters to home owners with their purchase at 839 9^th Street valued at $6000 in 1940.

Home of the Wades at least in 1940
839 9th Street, Huntington, West Virginia
from Google Maps

What became of Louise is not known.  However, Lanier married Katherine Gillespie in 1944, joined the Marines, and died in 1999.  Harry and Nelle, and Lanier and Katherine are all buried at the White Chapel Memorial Gardens in Barboursville, Cabell County, West Virginia. 

While poppies might induce sleep, even in a tent, the children will keep you entertained at Sepia Saturday.

© 2014, Wendy Mathias.  All rights reserved.