Valley Farmland Overlook, Appalachian Ridge, 1960s

Archive & AtlasEstablished · MMXXIII

Valley Farmland Overlook, Appalachian Ridge, 1960s — Archive & Atlas

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Valley Farmland Overlook, Appalachian Ridge, 1960s — Archive & Atlas

Unattributed 1960–1969

AA-2026-2AE40C

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Someone pulled off wherever the road allowed a view and decided this ridge, this patchwork of hayfields, and this particular arrangement of barns deserved a permanent record. That is the quiet confidence of the 1960s road-tripper, driving two-lane highways through Virginia or Pennsylvania farm country with a camera on the seat, certain that a long mountain and a scattering of white farmhouses added up to something worth the film.

The farms below are doing what farms in this kind of valley had done for two centuries, laying hay in long cut rows and letting the tree lines mark out property nobody needed a fence to remember. A single paved road curls through the middle of it, the one concession to the twentieth century, connecting houses that otherwise look like they could belong to any decade since the valley was cleared.

Nobody in this picture knew they were being useful to a future archive. They just knew the light was good, the barn roofs made a nice line against the dark ridge, and a photograph like this would prove, to somebody someday, that the trip actually happened.

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