A Juneau landmark burned down earlier this summer. It was beloved by many in town and, unbeknownst to some, around the world – thanks to a visitor who took a photo of it nearly 30 years ago. And for almost as long, it’s been a mystery for one man thousands of miles away.
Listen:
An old wooden house that was once a part of a dairy farm in the early 1900s has been collapsing slowly for decades. But when it was still mostly upright 30 years ago, a Microsoft employee visited Juneau, took a photo of the cabin and it became a background option for Windows Me (or Millennium Edition) in 2000.
That same year, a young man named Roy Bradley was entering college in Scotland. And on his first computer, the image stood out to him – a dilapidated, moss covered wood house being consumed by trees, a misty hillside in the background.
“I was scrolling through all the wallpapers, and bingo, we come to this one called Shed in Field – it just seemed to sing,” he said. “It popped out to me. It wasn’t the default one. The default one was just like a sort of standard Windows Millennium edition, but you could go through them all. It was just kind of ‘Oh! I like that,’ and I never knew where it was from.”
This experience Bradley had with Shed in Field – of loving a background photo but not knowing where it was from – is similar to one millions of people had with Bliss, a photo of a field in California. You’ve likely seen it — rolling green hills under a bright blue sky. Bliss was the default background for the next, and more popular, Windows operating system.
There are dozens of articles, YouTube videos, and blog posts about people traveling to the field where Bliss was taken.
But Bradley’s search for answers about Shed in Field proved more difficult. It felt more niche to him..
“People would have had to have gone looking to know that it was there, and only a few people have tried to find out where it is,” he said. “Me being one of them.”
He said he started searching online for it and found Reddit posts of others who asked the same questions: Where was the shed? What is its history? And why is the image so memorable?
This summer, the building burned to the ground and someone directed Bradley to KTOO’s coverage of the fire.
“Then I saw your story, and I saw another story that you’d done. So you’d done the one about the fire, and you’d done the other one about somebody who used to live there,” Bradley said. “And I thought it’s a million-to-one shot. ‘Just send it, see what she says.’ It can’t go wrong.”
So Bradley emailed KTOO, and we confirmed – the shed in the Microsoft background was indeed once part of an historic dairy farm in Juneau that this reporter wrote stories about. The shed is right off Glacier Highway.
“It was just so nice to be able to kind of track down somebody who stays there and who might be able to give me some more information,” he said.
Reminiscing about that time of his life, Bradley said opening his computer to the image made him feel closer to nature when he was stuck inside studying all day.
And even though the building was halfway across the world, it reminded him of home.
“There were sheds like that where I grew up in Scotland, in a place — You ever heard of an area called the Mull of Kintyre? Paul McCartney sang about it,” he said. “That’s where I grew up… about 60 miles outside of Glasgow. It had farms, and it wasn’t high mountains at all, but it was hills and things like that. But that image reminds me of old sheds that were there that had been left to ruin. They looked old. They looked sort of like they had been there since time began.”
Bradley said he’s content now that he knows where the photo was taken, and some of the history behind it.
Shed in Field still brings him a sense of peace, just like it used to almost 30 years ago.
“I know it’s only a desktop background,” he said. “But just when you open up the machine and it comes up, it’s something nice.”
