Picturing Minnesota's Cutover

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PicturingMINNEMINNE During the late 1930s and early 1940s, photographers on assignment from the New Deal’s Farm Security Administration fanned out across America to document the daily life and activities of the nation’s people. More than 164,000 black-and- white prints taken by FSA photographers such as Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans between 1935 and 1943 are now preserved in the Library of Congress. At least 1,500 of the captioned images capture mostly unfamiliar Min- nesota scenes, places, and faces. FSA programs targeted rural rehabilitation and resettlement, and northern Minnesota in par- ticular received its share of attention. One well-documented The MHS library has three microfilm rolls of FSA images of Minnesota, origi- region was the cutover, a vast nally produced in 1944. Included are rarely seen views of farming (including acreage of scrub forest, strug- farm auctions and machinery), haying, small towns (for example, Milaca, Litch- field, Hibbing, and Winton), people, and city views. Also available are 14,000 gling homesteads, and tiny captioned Midwest (Minnesota, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Missouri, towns dying along with the once Ohio, and Wisconsin) microfiche images and a printed index. lucrative lumbering industry. Six About 55,000 black-and-white FSA photos may be viewed online at the Library of Congress’s American Memory site: http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/ government photographers— fsowhome.html. To date some 1 million items in 43 collections have been digi- John Vachon (a Minnesota tized for online viewing. native), Russell Lee, Paul Carter, The information in this article is taken from the website and from Robert Reid’s book, Picturing Minnesota, 1936–1943: Photographs of the Farm Marion Post Wolcott, Jack Security Administration, published by the Minnesota Historical Society in Delano, and even Roy E. Stryker, 1989 and available from the MHS Press. All photographs, including the back- ground image of the Bendix schoolhouse, 1936, by Paul Carter, are courtesy of the administrative genius behind the Library of Congress. the FSA Historical Section’s

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SOTA’SSOTA’S CUTOVERCUTOVER

vision—found their way to or Photographers sent to the behind after the empire builders through the state. Great Lakes cutover region were had taken the forest, the ore, Early FSA images dramatized told, according to Robert L. and the topsoil.” the needs for government assis- Reid’s Picturing Minnesota, What follows is a sampling of tance to the nation’s rural poor, 1936–1943: Photographs of the Minnesota cutover images that the “lower third” of the country, Farm Security Administration, to complement the people and as they were called inside the document “the people, the way places described in the preced- organization. Later assignments they live, their isolation” and ing account of the 1937 timber shifted to photographing less “the look of the country.” They workers’ strike. The captions are needy inhabitants of farms, small were to capture, Stryker wrote based on the photographers’ towns, and cities. Lee in 1937, what was “left original field notes.

County FSA supervisor visiting the family of an FSA borrower, Lake of the Woods County, 1939. John Vachon

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A man at the bar on Saturday night, Craigville, 1937. Russell Lee

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FSA photographer being pulled out of the mud by a tractor near Little Fork, 1937. Roy Stryker

Lumberjacks in a bunkhouse, logging-camp near Efﬁe, 1937. Russell Lee

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Woman entering home that she and her daughter built on cutover in Aitkin County, 1939. John Vachon

Steam baths are very popular among the lumberjacks, Craigville (vicinity), August 1937. Russell Lee

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Card game in the Northern Minnesota Pioneer Home, established by the government to care for the former squatters and lumberjacks displaced from their homes in the Beltrami Island reforestation area, Spooner, September 1939. John Vachon

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Family of an FSA borrower in the cutover area, Itasca County, August 1941. John Vachon

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Children ready to leave for school in an old wagon, Beltrami Island reforestation project of the Minnesota state forest service, July 1936. Paul Carter

Lumberjack turning handspring, Little Fork (vicinity), June 1937. Russell Lee

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