‘Bringing in the harvest’ magic lantern slides

It’s harvest time, well actually it might or might not be, as it depends where you are on the planet. For instance, ‘Thanksgiving’ in the USA and Canada, originally a celebration of a successful harvest, occurs later than British harvest festivals. One of the benefits of owning a photographic archive that spans the globe, is the ability to compare what was happening in different places at the same point in time. An example is industrial processes, which were far more advanced in the USA in the early 1900s than in the UK, but that’s for another day.

Today, we focus on the universal task of harvesting the crops and the time period is the 1920s. The three images are, from top to bottom, Keighley in Yorkshire, England; Wellington in New South Wales, Australia and Fort Collins, Colorado, USA. These examples aren’t necessarily typical of normal practice, as there would have been high-tech and low-tech farmers in each country. However, from the many historical farming photographs that I’ve seen, I suspect that they do, in fact, fairly reflect the state of agricultural mechanisation at the time.

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