Grace Young and Lenore Yealy

An exceptionally-accomplished pair of albums, these books tell a story that is at once wholly aligned with the road trips of the 1920s and 1930s, and surprisingly transgressive of them. With scores of tenderly hand-colored images and meticulous captions, the books document five consecutive summer trips taken in the late-1920s by Grace Young and Lenore Yealy, a lesbian couple from Pennsylvania. There is a compelling juxtaposition between the depictions of familiar American scenery, and the complex lives of the images' photographers and principal subjects.

The first album chronicles the first trip they took in the summer of 1927 and aptly starts with the poem by Arthur Chapman “Out Where The West Begins” and includes images include Japanese gardens in Hollywood, a bear at Yosemite, a Hopi dance ceremony at the Grand Canyon, Old Faithful erupting at Yellowstone, and a beautiful well-preserved spread about the Giant sequoias in Mariposa Grove in Yosemite. The second album shows the remaining four trips with more brevity than the first album. Whereas the first trip was done by train, the rest of the vacations were by motor. The second album kicks off with a more focused trip to Western Colorado in 1928. There are many roadside views of wide-open pastures dotted by grazing cattle on the way to their campgrounds–which includes a menu involving “bacon, baked beans, and potatoes” prepared over a fire.

In 1929, it is noted that the pair traveled 8,275 miles through twenty states. Colorado is reprised but there is a greater focus on the Pacific Northwest; showing the snowy scenes in Oregon, Washington, and Montana. They continue to make their way through the Midwest with Wisconsin, the Great Lakes, and, for the first time, to the South. The album breaks chronology with a succession of breathtaking views of waterfalls, some including Latourell Falls, Multnomah Falls, and Horsetail Falls, as well as other landscape views of gorges, tunnels, rivers, highways, and man made road structures. The final image of this trip is the largest in the album: a group photograph of a hiking party in front of the SawTooth Mountains on Mt. Rainier on June 29, 1929. The documentation of the trip taken in the summer of 1930 is much sparser but shows the first instances of states in the Deep South such as Louisiana and Georgia. The final trip is in the summer of 1931, another Colorado focused trip, showing family portraits and visits with friends.

Both women were graduates of Indiana Normal School and worked as teachers in the Derry public schools. We believe they were a couple, as local papers consistently mention them traveling together over many years, they owned a house together, and they were living together when Lenora died in 1973. These albums capture as a fascinating and personal aspect of queer history, expanding the breadth of Americana. Many of the album pages are detached from the albums, otherwise condition is very good.