Until about World War II, the public domain was hardly a place for either women or children. It would have been unseemly, for example, for an unaccompanied woman to be seen in a hotel lobby. Hotels, banks, and other commercial establishments maintained separate “protected” environments for women where, in the 19th century, they could rest from the virtual strangulation of their clothing (corsets inhibiting the ability to expand the rib cage and actually breathe) or, in the 20th, to perform feminine duties such as the nursing of young children.

I recall in the early 1950s traveling to downtown Chicago with my mother—which puts the event before 1953—and seeing a woman seated on the bus or street car (Chicago still had some of those into the 50s) and wondering what the heck was going on; no one else seemed to notice that she was nursing an infant. [Incidentally, public nursing went out of fashion, indeed became quite unfashionable from the 70s onward, and has only recently become something suitable for the public realm.] At coffee several weeks ago at an establishment on 13th Avenue South I saw three women with children enjoying an afternoon of conversation and one of them nursed during their social hour: I wondered if the infant was being introduced to the same delicious liquid I was enjoying, or was it just “mother’s milk”?

“The Blenheim,” Agincourt’s up-scale hotel was built about 1900 and, although its lobby was considerably larger than The Garland’s in Bedford, Iowa, its proportions would have been more generous but of much the same character is this.

The only woman in sight is safely behind the desk and any others were probably upstairs changing bed linens or doing the laundry.

During the latter part of the 19th century, no town west of the Appalachians could have survived without the railroad. Delegations of civic leaders and capitalists made it their business to lobby for a rail connection to the outside world. And to bring this about, the consumption of alcohol and the smoking of cigars occurred in public, while bribes were often traded in private. The community’s future depended on it.

It was Justin Nelson’s enthusiasm for railroadiana that put Agincourt definitively on the Milwaukee Road (shortened reference for the Chicago, Milwaukee, St Paul & Pacific) and he designed its depot at the turn of the 20th century. Another student is working on that same project this semester, which has led me to wonder about the railroad’s physical presence and its long term influence on community history. This image of a Milwaukee Road yard in Perry, Iowa gives some indication of the scale of its physical plant.

I suspect we’ve not allowed enough room.

Agincourt’s contours (determined in the 2006 seminar but largely forgotten since then) have never been dramatic. Though the town is lumpier than, say, Fargo-Moorhead, that isn’t saying much.

The students in this semester’s 371 studio have needed contours more than I ever did; I suppose there’s something comforting about the textures of the landscape, its folds and dimples and pimples, that may nudge a building to the left or the right or back from “where it ought to be.” So, we looked more closely at the Original Townsite plat that was drawn in CADD by Ben Johnson way back in ’06 and reconsidered the effect of topography on the cityscape. It’s been an interesting process—if for no other reason than what they might do to some of my own designs.

I found a postcard recently—a real photo view of some elegant houses in Marshalltown, Iowa—that might be fairly typical of parts of Agincourt, especially The Avenue (i.e., Aincourt Avenue) where an entire 300-foot-long block front would have been shared by just three large houses, each on a 100 by 140-foot lot. If this is equivalent to the 100 Block of Agincourt Avenue N.E., then it would be Aidan and Cordelia Archer’s house on the corner and Jim and Martha Tennant’s place two houses farther down the street. The house in the middle of this view might make an interesting insertion between the Archer and Tennant houses, especially since I have yet to design what’s between them. The last house in this view (farthest on the right) wouldn’t be seen in Agincourt: that’s the site of St Joseph-the-Carpenter Episcopal church. If I had actual photoshop® skills, this would be a cake walk. Sadly, I do not.

Those two houses are still there, by the way, though the view is not nearly as evocative. What is it about the sepia-toned world a hundred years ago that satisfies in ways that scorched lawn and a hazy cloudless sky do not?