[Central Valley Agricultural Photo Album].

Description

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This absorbing collection of roughly fifty black-and-white photographs from the early 20th century deals with daily life in an agricultural community in California’s Central Valley.

The images cover a wide range of subjects, most relating to agricultural work, such as picking and drying fruit, transporting wheat, tilling fields, etc. Some images are of plants or produce alone (grapes, gourds, stone fruit, grains) or of farm animals. Others present scenes from daily life, including the last photograph in the album, of a child fishing.

No information on the photographer(s) is readily apparent, and the photographs are undated. One exception is a single photograph in the middle of the album labeled ‘Powell.’ The 2004 book by Richard Street, Photographing Farmworkers in California, discusses a young Ralph H. Powell, who photographed striking cotton workers in Corcoran, California, in 1933, mentioning that his father had a studio in Hanford. A 1911 issue of Camera Craft mentions L. W. Powell, ‘the well-known photographer of Hanford, California.’ It is, therefore, likely that the photograph in the present album came from the studio of the elder Powell. Incidentally, Ralph H. Powell (also often as Ralph W. Powell) continued working as a photographer, training under renowned California photographer Pop Laval (1882 – 1966, who frequently worked with Ansel Adams), producing photographs for military publications during the Second World War, and working as a professional photographer in Hanford.

The second-to-last photograph shows horses and carts before the Corcoran Grain Warehouse and a row of train cars belonging to the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railway. It closely resembles another taken c. 1910 – 1912, held in a photograph archive at the Kings County Museum at Burris Park. The other photographs in this collection would seem to match that date roughly, based on the subjects’ clothing, buildings, and other features, though they also appear to cover a range of dates (some individuals wear distinctly Victorian garb, while others dress in clothing more reminiscent of the 1920s or perhaps 1930s).

Another potential clue can be found in a small sticker for a Ford dealer in Fresno on the inside of the front cover – the sticker advertises the Ford V8, which first appeared in 1932 (at the same time, no automobiles are present in any of the photographs, another vague hint as to their date). Thus, it seems possible that the album was assembled soon after that date, containing a group of photographs from the preceding decades, perhaps from a single family, though none of the individuals obviously appear in multiple photographs.

In sum, this unique photograph collection provides a comprehensive glimpse into the life of an agricultural community in the Central Valley in the early decades of the 20th century.