Mountain valley farms with fields and forested ridges

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Terraced fields climb the slopes here, with farm buildings set low in the valley and forested ridges rising behind them. The record gives little beyond the title, so the picture is best read as a view of a working agricultural landscape: small family farms in a mountain setting, where the flat land is scarce and every cleared plot had to be worked by hand or with horse and plow. Look at how the fields follow the contours and how the dark tree line marks where the cultivated land stops, a pattern common to upland farming communities across the rural United States and Europe in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

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