Tractors used in cultivation, Wabash Farms, Indiana

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Tractors at work in the fields of Wabash Farms, Indiana, are the focus of this May 1938 view, captured on a 35 mm nitrate negative. By the late 1930s, tractors were steadily replacing horses for plowing and cultivating row crops across the Midwest, a shift that reshaped farm labor and the look of the countryside. The picture comes from the Farm Security Administration and Office of War Information files, which recorded American rural life during the Depression and the years that followed. Nitrate film of this era is highly flammable, so the negative is a fragile survivor of that documentary effort.

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