This photograph is one of many Marie Hartig Kendall (1854-1943) took of Norfolk farm scenes around the turn of the last century. Born in France, Marie trained as a nurse at Bellevue Hospital after moving to New York in the 1870s. Before graduating, however, she was dismissed for having become engaged to Dr. John C. Kendall, a resident physician there. Family lore recalls that she was somewhat of a rebel and asked the doctor for a watch instead of a wedding band, which she considered a symbol of women’s enslavement. After their marriage, the couple moved to Norfolk in 1884, where Dr. Kendall established a practice. Unable to afford photographs of her three children, Marie saved money to buy her own camera and soon found aq profitable way to help support the family. Country scenes and rural occupations were especially marketable with their nostalgic appeal of small-town bucolic American life, quickly vanishing at the time. Kendall sold her photographs to railroad companies for advertising brochures and as postcards. Although this photograph of a litter of piglets asleep near the warmth of a cast iron stover has no subtitle, she may well have affectionately referred to t as “Pigs in Heaven.”

—Ann Havemeyer

Photograph courtesy of the Norfolk Historical Society.