Ruth Snider’s Harvest, 1950

Harvest, Homecoming, and Hallowe’en – the three H’s of a Kingston autumn, perhaps? Today’s photo comes to you again from the prolific photographer, George Lilley, who captured the fruits of this lady’s labour in 1950.  At Queen’s Archives, with over three million photographs in our holdings, sometimes we need to rely on public input to gain more information on what we are seeing. Such was the case with this photo, originally titled “Woman with Big Pumpkin.”  It’s an apt description, but we had no other information on who she was, where this was taken, or why Mr. Lilley would seek out this opportunity to take a photo.  But many Kingstonians have a long memory, and one such individual was kind enough some years back to share this information with us.  This was not an anonymous woman, but one by the name of Ruth Snider, who resided at 27 Elgin Street in a tin house. She is showing off the vegetables that were grown in a vacant lot that the locals decided to put to better use as a community garden.  Now if we could only get the name of the duck hanging out by the rocking chair…