Glad to answer,
@ColinEssex - It actually brings back some good memories.
We lived fairly close to a marshy area - the Mississippi River batture (the area between the river levee and the river itself) where flood waters annually deposit alluvial soil from upriver. That makes the area marshy. That marshy area is where the mosquitoes and other little buzzing critters originated.
In areas where you have mosquitos in any abundance, a screen door is commonplace. Yes, it is EXACTLY like having two doors instead of one. You open the solid door but leave the screen door shut. That way you can get breezes through the house without inviting mosquitoes and flies and other flying insect beasties. A screen door would not stop a person intent on doing harm but a well-fitted screen door provides extra security from other kinds of creatures. Also stops stray cats and dogs and frogs.
Yes, we have window-screens as well. In fact, in my area, we potentially have three layers... the inner window with glass and whatever framework the window takes; then the screen over the glass window so you can raise the glass but keep the screen in place, then the storm shutters that cover the window and screen.
The only place we would not have screen doors in our area is if you lived in a yellow submarine. But you see screen doors in various homes in south Louisiana, the Mississippi (state) coast, the Alabama coast, and the Florida coast. I would presume them to be used in coastal Texas but I have never been to coastal Texas so won't make any assertions. I remember seeing screen doors and screened-in porches in central Alabama where my mother's family is still living, and that is about 150 miles north of the Gulf Coast. The wetlands associated with the Tuscaloosa River and the Tombigbee River provided the marshes for THEIR mosquitoes.
I mentioned that the alluvial deposits cause us to have marshy areas. The deposition occurs during the spring thaw of the northern part of the USA. The Mississippi river starts in Minnesota, in a place called Lake Itasca. Minnesota borders on Canada and gets heavy winter snowfall, so when their snow melts in spring, we get all the water in a surge. In fact, the Mississippi River drains 41% of the land in the USA. If it weren't for the levee system, we might have as much as 17 feet worth of spring floods. But it is those annual surges that deposit the soil on the river banks to build up the batture.
I remember as a kid during spring, summer, and fall that at night, when the house doors were open and the screen doors shut (before we got air conditioning), I could hear the ocean-going freight and tanker vessels going up and down the river. If the propellers could be heard "slapping" the water, we knew the boat was lightly loaded and thus riding high in the river. If it was more of a gutteral "thrum, thrum, thrum" sound, we knew the boat was riding lower and thus probably had a full load of cargo in it.
We lived upstream from the city, so we knew that a lot of the traffic we heard was due to the grain elevators and oil refineries that were built on the river banks between New Orleans and Baton Rouge. Beyond Baton Rouge, you would only be likely to hear barge traffic - totally different because of the barges being pushed by "tug boats" with smaller engines. Though the Mississippi River IS navigable much farther up its channel for shallow-draft barges, the deep-riding ocean freighters cannot go farther. They would "bottom out" in some of the twists and turns.
