Dust fills the sky as a farmer and his two sons move toward a wooden structure, fence posts barely visible in the background. A black woman wearing a polkadot dress is standing in front of an American flag, a mop to one side of her and a broom on the other – a play on the painting American Gothic. Two children huddle next to their mother, faces turned away, as the woman touches her chin and looks into the distance.
These are descriptions of some of the most well-known photographs portraying life in the United States from 1935 to 1944. Beginning in the Great Depression, the federal government undertook a large-scale photography project to document cash loans made to farmers by the Resettlement Administration. The project eventually grew to focus on sharecroppers in the South, agricultural workers across the Midwest and West, urban and rural environments, and World War II preparations. Nearly 175,000 black-and-white negatives and 107,000 black-and-white photographs make up what is now known as the Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection archived by the Library of Congress.
So, what links Montrose, Colorado to this visual record of our country’s history? The answer is the man who led the project – Roy Emerson Stryker. Stryker was born in Kansas in 1893 and raised in Montrose after his family moved to Spring Creek Mesa. A kid with a voracious reading habit, a chemistry enthusiast turned college student in Golden, a cattle rancher near Ouray, and a miner in Ophir – Roy Stryker was all of these things before making his way to New York City with his wife Alice after serving in the infantry during World War I. In 1924, he graduated from Columbia University and stayed on as an instructor of economics. It was Stryker’s interest and experience in illustrating economic issues with photography, as well as his connection to Columbia professor and head of the Farm Security Administration Rexford Tugwell, that landed him the opportunity to work for the government developing a New Deal era project to document life in the United States.
For nearly a decade, Stryker coordinated sending photographers on assignment throughout the United States and Puerto Rico, giving them instructions on geographic areas and subject matter to cover. Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans and Gordon Parks are just a few of the well-respected artists who found themselves traversing the country and recording what they saw. In 1939 and 1940, two photographers even made stops in Montrose County. Arthur Rothstein and Russell Lee documented the happenings in town and a bit of the countryside during their visits.
Beginning October 1 and viewable for the month, Montrose Regional Library will display ten reproduced photos made in Montrose as part of the Farm Security Administration project. Stop by the library’s Local Author Collection to see a small slice of local history and learn more about Roy Stryker and the photographers who documented this area. This exhibit is also supported by research from the Montrose County Historical Museum. Want to search the Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection online? More information can be found on the Library of Congress Website at https://www.loc.gov/pictures/collection/fsa/
Christine Tharp is an Adult Services Librarian at Montrose Regional Library.
