Browse Items (1402 total)

Caption suggests this photo was taken at the Gibson Farm in Wayland, NY, and a migrant labor camp run by Carl and Lucille Moore. While accommodations look extremely basic--a shared kitchen and refrigerator for perhaps dozens of farmworkers--Moore had…

George N. Comer was founder, in 1840, of a Boston "Commercial College" bearing his name. The subjects it taught were eclectic: penmanship, bookkeeping, commercial correspondence and computations, navigation, engineering, and surveying. The…

Two horses and a farmer working the fields.

Advertisement depicts farm apparatus manufactured by P.D. Wright of Rochester, NY. It was designed to rake hay, which needs to dry after cutting but is susceptible to rain--thus, raking and baling the hay quickly was important. In Western New York, a…

Prior to the 1800s, corn was planted by hand in hillocks or rows. Industrial technologies profoundly affected agriculture with many patent machines like this horse-drawn planter designed by Calvin Olds. In a language typical for other devices of the…

Close-up photograph of the largest crop harvested by migrant farmworkers in Wyoming County, primarily due to the careful hand work needed to prevent damage. A week before potatoes were harvested, an herbicide was sprayed on the foliage. Original…

Map shows a somewhat idealized pattern of migrant farm labor on the east coast during the mid-twentieth century. As many as an estimated 58,000 workers in 1949 followed harvests northward. They were primarily Black, and worked in "areas of intensive…

Carl Moore was the "crew leader" for Roy Gibson's farm near Wayland, NY. What this title meant is that he served as an intermediary between farmer and migrant farmworkers: he recruited them (from Florida) and bused them up to New York; their wages…

Originally entitled, "Mrs. Moore (Carl's Mother) & Roy Gibson (Tomato Series A) Moore Camp, Steuben", under number 449, Mrs. Moore and Roy Gibson, sort through tomatoes with gloves after they are processed through a machine in Moore Camp on Gibson…

Man stands at a machine that appears to be sorting and removing dirt from tomatoes. An advisory label on the machine reads "extreme caution" in Spanish. The photograph is part of a "Tomato Series" showing the work process at Gibson Farm.