Nellie Coutant wins her first magazine prize

Two views of the same room, including the critiques written as captions by the Ladies Home Journal, December 1898.  Notice her bathroom in the corner, including her chamber pot, her pitcher and basin sink, her mirror, and her little towel rack. There appear to be a lot of photographs on the wall too.

From the Crawfordsville newspaper, we know Nellie Coutant was showing her photographs and winning prizes at the city fair in September 1897* along with May Klein (misspelled Kline) and George Gregg. In January of 1899, these papers also announced when Nellie won her first prize money ($10) from the December 1898 issue of Ladies Home Journal, one of five second prize awards for "interior girls' rooms". LHJ appears to have offered one or more of these monthly photo contests to create content-spreads for decorating ideas. Submissions and prize winners were then run uncredited in decorating articles, labeled by hometown. 

For the Girls' Room Contest, there were three images printed from Crawfordsville, Indiana, showing two distinct bedrooms. The similarities in the washstand-corners could be imagined in the same house, perhaps the rooms of sisters. Or could one room belong in a different house, such as that of May Klein? 

Without more information from the LHJ, this mystery may not be solved, and may not be worth pursuing, but in either case, one of these three images won Nellie Coutant $10 in 1898; the buying power equivalent of about $300 in 2019. 

(This was the picture references as 'to the left of the above one.)
 

Noteworthy, the First Prize was awarded to the Frances B. Johnston

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* I have had trouble finding where archives to city and country fairs might be. I found one article about the history of the Miss Indiana State Fair winners, which seemed to be based on photos the author had taken of the ladies head-shots in a fair building; not exactly an easy-to-search, reliable database!