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Russell Lee photographed Gemmel, Minnesota for the Farm Security Administration in August 1937. The Library of Congress catalogues the town under Koochiching County, spelling it with a single L; the site and the U.S. Board on Geographic Names spell it Gemmell, with two. The Library records the date for every frame as 1937 Aug., placing the whole set within a single month. 10 of Lee’s frames from that month survive in the Library’s files, split between two shelflist lots: Lot 1140, built as a comprehensive story of the cut-over region of northern Minnesota, and Lot 1143, a record of lumber camps near Effie. Together they show what two of the Library’s own captions call a logging “bust” town and a former prosperous lumbering center.
Lee’s first frame in the set shows a store building and the sidewalk in front of it. The Library’s caption places it plainly: this had been, once, the main street of Gemmel. Its call number in the Library’s system is LC-USF34- 030291-D, filed within Lot 1140.
The next two frames from the same month turn to the town’s consolidated school, boarded shut. One caption gives the reason without hedging, calling Gemmel, in the Library’s own words, a logging “bust” town.
A second frame moves in closer, on the entrance alone. The caption calls it simply the entrance to the consolidated school, now boarded up, without describing what lay beyond the boards. Both school photographs, like the store-front image before them, are filed together in Lot 1140.
Lee then turned his camera on the town’s old hotel, photographing it first from the front. The caption notes that the lower part of the building was occupied by an old woman, and gives no more about her than that. This frame carries its own call number, LC-USF342- 030521-A, distinct from the others in Lot 1140.
A second frame shows the same hotel from a side entrance. Its caption repeats the same fact: an old woman was living there, this time entering from the side. The two hotel photographs were made close together that August, one from the front and one from the side, and both keep the same detail: an old woman occupied the lower floor.
A third frame from August 1937 shows Gemmel’s post office. The caption gives nothing beyond the building’s name and function: no postmaster, no hours, no customers in the frame. It, too, belongs to Lot 1140, placing the post office among the same handful of frames as the store, the school and the hotel.
Two frames in the set belong to Lot 1143, the Library’s record of lumber camps built up near Effie between May and September of 1937. One photographs an old log hoist standing in a lumber camp in Gemmel; the caption places the machine there and says nothing of who last ran it. Lot 1143 as a whole was assembled to document logging camp operations near Effie in comprehensive detail, 118 prints in all, and this frame is one piece of that larger record.
A second frame from the same lot shows an old sled built for hauling logs out of the forest. The caption locates it at a camp near Gemmel, separate from the hoist, and offers no further detail about the operation it once served. Both camp photographs carry the month 1937 Aug., the same date stamped across every frame in this set, tying the equipment pictures to the same visit that produced the street and hotel views.
One frame turns from buildings and machinery to a person. The caption describes an old resident in the corner of a beer parlor, and calls Gemmel itself, by name, a former prosperous lumbering center. It also points to a sign and a battery-operated radio in the frame, details the Library thought worth recording alongside the resident. This frame, too, is filed in Lot 1140, grouped with the pictures of the street, the school, the hotel and the post office rather than with the camp equipment.
The last frame in the set, also from Lot 1143, shows a family and a brother-in-law living in a tarpaper shack in a lumber camp near Gemmel. The caption names no one, states no occupation, and offers nothing beyond the bare fact of where they were living. It is the only frame in this set that shows a household rather than a street or a machine. Its call number places it back in Lot 1143 with the hoist and the sled, the frame closing out the record of camps near Gemmel rather than the record of the town itself.
Across the 10 frames, Lee’s camera moves from an empty main street to a school boarded shut, from a hotel and a post office still standing to camps left with their equipment behind, and finally to two households still there in August 1937. That is what the Library’s own captions, and its own filing of these frames, preserve of Gemmel.
1937: Russell Lee in the Lumber Towns works through the Library of Congress’s 1937 survey of this county’s lumber towns one town at a time. The photographs are in the public domain; the captions are the Library’s; the article adds nothing the captions do not carry.
The Library of Congress catalogues this town as Gemmel, with one L. The site and the U.S. Board on Geographic Names spell it Gemmell. Captions are reproduced exactly as the Library has them.
Every photograph above was made in 1937 by Russell Lee for the Farm Security Administration and is held by the Library of Congress. The Library states: “The contents of the Library of Congress Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Black-and-White Negatives are in the public domain and are free to use and reuse.” Each item record carries the advisory “No known restrictions”, and the caption under each picture is the Library’s own, reproduced word for word.
Credit line supplied by the Library: Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Black-and-White Negatives.
The frames in this instalment come from:
Farm Security Administration, Office of War Information Black-and-White Negatives at the Library of Congress · the Library’s rights statement for this collection
