Browse Items (1402 total)

Like other Cavazos paintings about agricultural work--Fields,The Cherry Pickers Are Working--sweeping vistas evoke underlying, difficult questions about perspective. Here, the curvature associated with panoramic views depicts a long line of cabbages…

Photograph of an unidentified painting, probably by Juan Cavazos. A self-taught painter, Cavazos traveled from Mexico for employment as a migrant farmworker in Western New York. With support from the Geneseo Migrant Center and the MollyOlga Art…

The livelihoods of Western New York farmers were tied to commodity prices on the world markets, particularly those in London, and so The Genesee Farmer often devoted space to trends. Factors like global weather, crop failures, and emerging producers…

Undated photo shows two women and two young children in a field, equipped with woven baskets. The crop being harvested probably is potatoes. Given the photo's apparent age and the tools used, it's possible that this dates to the mid-1940s, when…

Full title of image reads, "A new map and profile of the proposed canal from Lake Erie to Hudson River in the State of New York," and several details indicate the project's state of flux. For example, two different routes west of the Genesee River…

This idealized diptych appeared in The Genesee Farmer, an agricultural newspaper, showing its readers the clearing of forests so as to create farmland. By the date of publication, settlement and the "Pioneer" figure already was imbued with mythic…

Removal of trees so as to create farmland, and especially the stumps left behind, was an arduous process for European settlers. Although there were complex (and expensive) "patent machines" available, small farmers trying to remove fairly…

Clearing forested lands to create open agricultural land was an arduous process, which is why this device may have been of interest to farmers: "This machine is not only used for pulling stumps, but it is applicable to moving buildings, rocks, &c. It…

Caption to this diagram reads "Large Base Puller and Various Uses to Which a Stump Puller Can Be Put." The alphabetic labels show different types of arrangements, both recommended and not, for the removal of trees. By the time of this book's…

The 19th-century land rush was heavily subsidized by railroad companies, who had been granted large tracts of appropriated indigenous land and had a financial stake in the settlement of territories. This advertisement lists out eighteen inducements…