Potatoes and Barrels

A Vintage Photos Theme Park photo for the theme of fields, crops, pastures.

Empty barrels line the rows of dug-up potatoes in this photo of a potato harvest. On the right-hand side, men are placing barrels full of potatoes on a horse-drawn wagon. The horses on the left may be pulling a mechanical potato digger. A man standing in the middle and other workers in the far distance are using baskets to gather the potatoes and put them in the barrels. See a cropped version of the photo for a better view of the harvest activities in the field.

This is an unused real photo postcard with no address, message, or date. The back of the card has an Azo stamp box design (with squares in all four corners) that suggests a time frame that may range from 1924 to 1949.

Although there's no indication of the location where this photo was taken, an article by Paul E. Rand details a similar process of Harvesting Potatoes in Maine. His description is part of Presque Isle: The Star City, a site on the Maine Memory Network. For a similar harvest photo that's referenced in Rand's article, see Harvesting Potatoes, Presque Isle, 1940.