45 photos of amazing homes from the past we've just discovered
Jaw-dropping photos of historic homes

Grand antebellum house

This picture from 1934 was taken for the Historic American Buildings Survey by photographer Ralph Clynne. Constructed between 1816 and 1821, the Arlington estate in Natchez, Mississippi is rumoured to have been built by New Jersey native John Hampton White for his wife, Jane Surget White. The two-storey red brick mansion became the couple's marital home and was filled with treasures. Nowadays, it's sadly abandoned.
Commandant's house

This historic house in Watertown, Massachusetts was built in 1865 towards the end of the American Civil War. Commissioned as a new commander's quarters by Captain Thomas J. Rodman, the lavish home would have cost around $63,000 to build; a significant cost at the time. Inside the layout is built around a central hall, with heavy moldings, ceiling medallions and marble fireplaces adorning the interior.
Biltmore under construction

In 1888, George Vanderbilt visited Asheville, North Carolina and was captivated by the area. He purchased 125,000 acres on which to build his country estate, enlisting architect Richard Morris Hunt to design him a home to rival the great country mansions of France. In 1895, Hunt delivered a 250-room chateau to serve as the lavish Vanderbilt family home. This image shows it halfway through construction.
America's greatest stately home

A relocated house

This incredible photo captures the aftermath of the notorious Johnstown flood in Pennsylvania in 1889. Skewered by an enormous uprooted tree, this house belonged to a Mr John Schultz who was one of six people inside to escape with their lives when the devastating flood hit. The structure was carried down the street by the force of the waters when the South Fork Dam broke killing more than 2,200 people.
Early homes in The Hamptons

This photo shows the East Hamptons house of Edward Everett McCall, who ran unsuccessfully as the Democratic candidate for Mayor of New York City in 1913. In the late 19th century and early 20th century, wealthy families came to The Hamptons looking for a retreat from the city, including esteemed families such as The Kennedys. They built beach houses and holiday homes, transforming Long Island coastal farmland into some of the most expensive and sought-after real estate in the world.
Colonial house interior

Judging from the dress of the two women and the display of pewter plates above the mantel, you might imagine this picture to be much older than it is. It was taken in 1913 by photographer, artist and canny businessman Wallace Nutting, who made his fortune selling nostalgic prints that portrayed an idealised version of an ‘old world’ New England. As such, the houses were staged, and the subjects wore costumes and his prints were reportedly earning him $1,000 a day.
Grey Gardens

Captured in 1914, the Grey Gardens estate in East Hampton, New York is best known for being the one-time residence of the Beale family, specifically Edith 'Little Edie' Bouvier Beale, who was filmed living in squalor there with her mother in the 1975 documentary Grey Gardens. However, when this image of the gardens was taken, it was owned by Robert C. Hill and his wife. The imported Spanish concrete walls create a private sanctuary, with their grey hue giving the house its name.
A stately hospital in the First World War

For four years during the First World War, Great Dixter House in East Sussex in the UK opened its doors to 380 wounded soldiers. The great hall and the solar (an upper-floor sleeping chamber) were converted into temporary wards to house 20 patients at a time. This picture was taken in 1916 and shows the soldiers and nurses eating in the requisitioned great hall.
A French Chateau during the First World War

During the First World War, many of the wounded soldiers were treated in abandoned chateaus throughout France. This photo was taken in 1915 and shows French and German soldiers in convalescence after serving at the front.
The Roaring Twenties?

It may have been the dawn of modernism but at the beginning of the 1920s, wealthy homeowners were still fairly Victorian in their tastes. As for the working classes, many people would not have had indoor bathrooms. Most furniture would have been handmade as this was before mass production methods were around and open fires were still predominantly the main source of heating.
A 1920s bedroom

The 1920s was an economic boomtime and private spaces such as the bedroom would have been decorated in luxurious furnishings and expensive furniture sets. It was also the decade when electricity began making an appearance in the home, becoming much more widespread by the end of the decade.
Swerves and curves

The glamorous 1930s was the decade that Art Deco turned into Art Moderne. Stucco was a favourite, delivering a smooth surface and crisp finish to highlight the dramatic, geometric shapes. Driveways were also becoming increasingly common as more people bought their own cars, though these were still very much a luxury.
An ordinary 1930s living room

While the decade is often thought of as glamorous, the 1930s were pretty tough going for many families. Times were hard but those who could afford it would splash out on the latest fashions and interior trends for their homes. Ivory, beige and metallics were all the rage in interior design and modernism, with its clean lines and geometric shapes, took over from the Victorian frills and embellishments.
1930s bathroom

This amazing bathroom epitomises what a luxury wash space would have looked like in the 1930s. Much like today, brass and marble were the height of fashion, with streamlined shapes and clean finishes becoming a feature in fashionable homes.
Living in the Dust Bowl

The Dust Bowl was the name given to the drought-stricken Southern Plains region of the USA, which suffered severe storms during a dry period in the 1930s. High winds swept the region from Texas to Nebraska as people and livestock were killed and crops failed across the entire region. In 1938, this shack and smallholding in the Coldwater District, north of Dalhart, Texas was still occupied, but abandoned farms were a common sight to see as people fled the area.
Drought-stricken communities

In this picture, a farmer and two sons are seen trying to escape a storm in 1936 in Cimarron County, Oklahoma. The Dust Bowl lasted for around a decade. By 1934, an estimated 35 million acres of formerly cultivated land had become useless for farming and severe dust storms meant that many people developed chest pains. Even the most well-sealed homes couldn't escape the horror of living in grime and filth.
Houses buried in dust

Roughly 2.5 million people left the Dust Bowl states of Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, Nebraska, Kansas and Oklahoma. Oklahoma had the biggest migration, as many people were left poverty-stricken. Homes suffered erosion from the wind and the accumulation of sand that was so huge that residents had to dig their houses out with shovels or let them get completely buried. Residents kept oiled clothes on window sills to try and collect the dust.
Dust Bowl trailers

Many families migrated away from the Dust Bowls but were then left homeless and without work. This photo shows a family from Texas in 1940 on the Arizona Highway 87, south of the city of Chandler. The family were migrants living in a trailer in an open field with no sanitation or water.
The Great Depression

The 1930s were also the time of the Great Depression. This man in El Cerrito, in San Miguel County, New Mexico is descended from one of the oldest families in his village, and his house was one of the oldest there. Taken in 1941, the photograph shows that although he lived in only one room, the house was made as homely as possible with picture frames on the walls and a central heater.
Workers' housing

This photo, which was taken in 1936, shows some of the temporary buildings that were constructed to house people who worked on the Passamaquoddy Tidal Power Project. This simple modular housing was created to accommodate the influx of workers, the majority of which were young men, to the state of Maine.
Adolf Hitler's residence

In Europe, during the 1930s many people were living in poverty but rising Nazi leader Adolf Hitler was accumulating power and with it wealth and resources. Like many property-hungry dictators, he commandeered the former German president's private apartment in Berlin's Reich Chancellery in 1934 and renamed it the Führerwohnung, meaning leader's apartment. The Nazi dictator was unimpressed with the space, which he thought looked "fit for a soap company”.
A dictator's remodel

Hitler's private office

Hitler's private office was more compact and austere. Aside from his official Berlin residence, he owned a country retreat, the Berghof in Bavaria, along with an apartment in Munich. During the Second World War, he also spent more than 800 days in the fortified bunker known as the Wolfsschanze (Wolf's Lair) in a forest in modern-day Poland.
Hitler's private library

The Führerwohnung library contained Hitler's personal collection of books, which numbered an estimated 6,000 volumes. A voracious reader, Hitler is said to have got through one book a day, though many great works of literature were banned by the regime.
A miner’s home in postwar America

After the end of the Second World War, labourers, including miners, held a wave of strikes calling for better pay and working hours, as well as reforms to working conditions. This miner family in Kentucky are seen in the kitchen of their tiny three-room house. The couple lived with their six children and six grandchildren and rented the house for $6 (£4.60) a month, living with no running water or electricity.
Inside a company housing project

Texan house and fruit stand

Abandoned cabin in the American South

Captured around 1940, this home in the American South was a typical modest property from this period. Due to the Great Depression, which only abated in 1939, many cabins in former mining hotspots were eventually abandoned and reduced to ghost towns, with rural residents relocating to larger cities around the 1950s.
Boston's tenement buildings

Tenement home in New York City

Child labourers in a tenement apartment

A tenant house in Mississippi

Cabin surrounded by cotton

These tenant farmer houses consisted of log cabins or clapboard shotgun houses, with many featuring wooden shutters. Plumbing was non-existent and water was provided from nearby springs or wells. Captured around 1940, this old tenant house in Louisiana has a mud chimney, while fields of cotton surround the small dwelling.
Life on the plantation

A dugout homestead

Pictured in 1940, this is the dugout house of Faro Caudill, a homesteader. The house was located in Pie Town, New Mexico which was home to a number of migrants from the Dust Bowl states. Around 250 families lived in Pie Town at the time, leading modest, self-sufficient lifestyles.
Living underground in a dugout

Inside a 1960s fallout shelter

Fallout shelters were constructed as civil defence measures to reduce casualties in the event of a nuclear strike during the Cold War. This one was built by Louis Severance adjacent to his home near Akron, Michigan. It includes special ventilation, an escape hatch, a small kitchen and enough space to accommodate the family of four. The underground bunker cost around $1,000 to build and offered running water and sanitary facilities too.
The White House renovation

While many American families were building fallout bunkers, the White House was undergoing a complete reconstruction. After the grand structure was deemed unsafe, an extensive rebuild took place from 1949-1952. This photo shows the facade in 1951 in the midst of renovation works. The old sandstone steps were so worn that they had to be stripped out and replaced with stone.
Grand stairway rebuilt

Iconic interior reduced to rubble

Nuclear test site house

The aftermath of the nuclear test

Monsanto House of the Future

Xanadu Foam House of Tomorrow

The Xanadu Houses were a series of experimental homes built during the early 1980s. Pictured here in Wisconsin, this UFO-style property was one of three futuristic homes constructed, with the other two found in Tennessee and Florida. A fast and cost-effective alternative to concrete, they were built with polyurethane insulation foam and featured some of the first smart home automation systems. Talk about eye-opening!
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