A view of Gloucester County life in the late 19th century recently surfaced when Margaret Perritt, a former resident now residing in Maine, was cleaning out her desk.

Perritt believes the photos, which have family connections to her, date from around 1890. She attributes them to Blanche Dimmock, born Oct. 11, 1871 at Sherwood in Naxera, who was “quite a good photographer” who contributed work to the 1915 book “Historic Homes and Churches of Virginia” by Robert Lancaster. She said Blanche had a twin, Minna, and both received cameras for Christmas around 1890.

The photos include images of the twins and an unidentified woman, in front of a house that Perritt cannot identify; an icehouse which she thinks may be the one at Exchange that was built up to become the home Cherokee, or a nearby icehouse at Toddsbury; and a sailing canoe titled “Sailboat off Sherwood.”

The final shots show Burgh Westra on the North River and a mill which Perritt believes is Robins Mill, a structure near Roanes that burned in 1942. She would like for someone to confirm the view.

In the photo of the twins, Perritt said that  “Blanche … is the smiling one and Minna Dimmock has her back to the camera. I am not sure who the other one was. The interesting thing to me about this picture is how stylishly the girls are dressed. Most of their clothes were designed and made by their mother at Sherwood. She was a classic seamstress and the twins were always very smartly dressed even though they struggled to make ends meet.”

About the ice house photo, Perritt writes that Gloucester had several other icehouses as well, at Rosewell, Hockley, and Airville. They were constructed, she said, “like a brick silo and then the earth was built up around them to a point where the sun cast a shadow to the base so that the building never heated up because of the shadow from the overhanging eaves and the fact that the round walls kept the sun from settling for any length of time.”

Perritt is connected to the Dimmocks through mutual ancestors Robert Colgate Selden and Courtenay Warner Brooke. In 1834, she said, Selden moved from Norfolk to Gloucester to take up farming, purchasing Sherwood to do that. Two years later, “In 1836, he married the girl next door, Courtenay, of Warner Hall.”

And the rest is history, some of which is resurfacing now in the old photos found in a desk which she took when she moved to Maine.