A couple of weeks ago I was rummaging around in the Julian Huxley Papers, mostly looking at photographs. There are so many photographs in this collection–thousands I would guess, taken across many decades and from all around the world. There was one particular batch of unidentified and undated images and as soon as I saw them I realized that I am probably the only person alive who knows what they are. That’s too much of a burden for me so I’m going to tell you guys about it.

Nearly seven years ago I wrote a post about a picture I found in William Ward Watkin’s papers. It was a construction photo of a small house that he designed and built for three bachelor faculty members–Julian Huxley, the mathematician Griffith Evans, and Arthur Hughes of Physics. It was this house I recognized in the unlabeled photos.

Here’s the construction photo from that first post:

And here’s the finished product that I found the other day:

There were a couple of nice images of the interior as well. It’s lovely, graceful and practical with plenty of bookcases for the young scholars:

And finally there’s this, the only one with writing on the back– “after the big storm.” You can see the damage: downed trees and construction materials strewn around the site. This would make the date August 18, 1915, the day after a Category 4 hurricane slammed into Galveston. (I’ve mentioned this hurricane before, here.)

Bonus: I heard from several people recently that the link to the video of my  talk about the Masterson Crisis was broken. Thanks to the good offices of Scientia, it’s working again. Here’s the new link.

Fair warning: it’s an hour long so you have to have a high tolerance for me to watch this.

Extra Bonus: Wet paint.