[Rural scenes of children fishing: boy and girl at pond behind barn]

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A boy and a girl sit at the edge of a pond tucked behind a barn, lines dangling in the water, in a scene that captures a quiet afternoon on a farm in the years around 1907 to 1910. Photographs like this one belong to the Library of Congress's large collection of rural life images from that era, when genre pictures of country children at play were popular with photographers and with the magazines and publishers who reproduced them. The pairing of a boy and a girl at the water's edge, with the working barn looming behind them, shows how farm life and childhood leisure could share the same ordinary space. The record gives no names for the children, so the picture is best read as a glimpse of everyday rural childhood in the early twentieth century.

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