Easter Fun at Miss Porter’s

A picture really is worth a thousand words and the many family snaps, prints, commercial photographs and post cards in the Miss Porter’s House collection paint a vivid portrait of Newcastle life in the early years of the twentieth century. They tell the many stories of Florence and her daughters Ella and Hazel who lived in the house from 1910, when Florence was a new bride, until the death of Hazel Porter in 1997.

See Herbert celebrating an Eight Hour Day Procession on one of the Porter shop’s delivery carts, & enjoying watermelon with friends. Recall one of the many Cottage Creek floods; common in the early twentieth century and which continue to occasionally inundate Newcastle West. Spot the Gas Works Office, all that remains in 2023 of the nineteenth century Steel Street Gas Works which dominated the view from Florene and Herbert’s bedroom window. Find Florence’s washing line and see Ella and Hazel Porter at Cooks Hill School and posing for one of their first studio photographs.