Midwest United States
AA-2026-B2B432
On the image
The checkered fields below look like someone's grand proof that order was possible in America. Section-line roads run straight through farmland in the grid the government surveyed a century before, dividing the landscape into neat squares of cultivation, and from five thousand feet up, the whole Midwest appears to have been solved like a math problem. A commercial airline passenger in the 1950s could look out the window during a flight from Chicago to St. Louis and watch the evidence of postwar agricultural expansion unfold in pastel shades of crop rotation—some fields planted, some fallowed, some in transition. The roads are so straight they seem to prove something about efficiency and American certainty. By the 1950s, that grid had been there so long that nobody remembered it was ever a choice.
The historian's note
The rectangular field pattern visible here is the result of the Public Land Survey System established under the Land Ordinance of 1785, which divided the Northwest Territory and subsequent western lands into numbered townships and sections. The one-mile-square sections and the section-line roads that separate them created the uniform grid visible from above across the Midwest and Great Plains. In the 1950s, commercial air travel had made such views commonplace for the first time; passengers could observe the continent's organization directly. The color shifts in the fields reflect crop rotation practices and seasonal variations in cultivation. This aerial perspective became a standard way of documenting and understanding American agricultural geography during the postwar period.
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Midwest Agricultural Landscape from the Air, 1950s. 1950–1959. Archive & Atlas, Historical Image Library, AA-2026-B2B432. https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/midwest-agricultural-landscape-from-the-air-1950s.
@misc{aaAA2026B2B432,
title = {Midwest Agricultural Landscape from the Air, 1950s},
year = {1950–1959},
howpublished = {Archive \& Atlas, Historical Image Library},
note = {Accession AA-2026-B2B432},
url = {https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/midwest-agricultural-landscape-from-the-air-1950s}
}TY - ART TI - Midwest Agricultural Landscape from the Air, 1950s PY - 1950–1959 PB - Archive & Atlas, Historical Image Library AN - AA-2026-B2B432 UR - https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/midwest-agricultural-landscape-from-the-air-1950s ER -
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