Sadye Irene Fleming on a porch, c. 1920

Sadye Irene Fleming in her late teens or very early twenties — on the concrete stoop of a wood-clapboard house, hand on hip, the early-1920s side-coiled “headphone braids” hairstyle gathered over each ear. She wears a two-tier plaid dress with a peplum waist over the dropped skirt, dark stockings, low boots. The hillside drops away behind her into trees and brush.

The faint cursive inscription across the top margin is too light to read in this scan but is likely the photographer’s or family note placing the day.

The dress style and hairstyle date this somewhere in the c. 1919-1922 range — the same window as her 1919 graduation portrait and her 31 December 1920 marriage to Earl A. Wildermuth. The two images sit at the start of her adult life, before the five children, before the move to Marietta if she had not already made it, before the Wildermuth-shoemaker household she would help run for the next fifty-five years.

The wood clapboard, the concrete steps, and the rural hillside background read as the kind of small West Virginia or southeastern Ohio house she would have been visiting or living at during the courtship and early-marriage years.

Source: family collection.