Have the entire collection of America’s Rural Yesterday Volume 1, 2, 3, 4 and the newly published volume 5. These books have beautiful photographs by famed photographer J.C. Allen & Sons, Inc.

Set includes:

America’s Rural Yesterday: Volume 1, Fieldwork: More than 100 photographs of fieldwork, including planting, tilling, harvesting, and more. Includes shots of threshing, corn shelling, milling, and hay stacking. Horses, mules, oxen, vintage tractors, and stream engines provided power back when rural life was the norm. Many of these photos have never been published.

America’s Rural Yesterday: Volume 2, Barn & Farmyard: More than 120 of farm work performed in dairy, poultry, and hog barns, as well as a wide variety of tasks performed in the barnyard, including ensilaging, stock feeding and watering, haymow loading, threshing, corn grinding, butchering, collecting eggs, root cellaring and much more. Many of these photos have never been published.

America’s Rural Yesterday: Volume 3, At Home & In Town: This book features photos of people's actions when they weren’t working in the fields, barns, or farmyards in the 1920s-1940s. More than 120 photographs of rural families in their kitchens, parlors, and dining rooms. Photos of going to town and spending time at the library, grocery or general stores, school, and doctor's office transport the reader to another time when life moved slower, and family and community were important. Many of these photos have never been published.

America’s Rural Yesterday: Volume 4, Early Tractors: The fourth installment in this series of books using J.C. Allen photos to illustrate how rural life in the first half of the last century, America’s Rural Yesterday Volume IV: Early Tractors, takes the reader back to when these machines were brand new additions to the farmer’s fleet. Over 250 photos from the first half of the 20th century. Most photos depict
tractors working in farm fields or barnyards.

America’s Rural Yesterday: Volume 5, Farm Kids: Fifth in a five-volume series showcasing the vintage photography of J.C. Allen & Sons, Inc., this book features photos of children working, playing and caring for livestock on the family farm in the 20s, 30s and 40s.

Take a trip to a simpler era, when inventors crafted solutions that required neither chips nor circuit boards – just plain old American ingenuity. This collection features a variety of tools, presented with original photos and text. Can you identify these mystery items without looking at the descriptions?

All of the tools come from the pages of Farm Collector, a magazine for collectors of vintage farm equipment. In the monthly What Is It? feature, readers contribute photos of objects and others pitch in to identify the items (often sharing memories of personal experiences with long-forgotten tools). The popular articles have been running for 12 years, and this collection draws from that rich archive to present some of the most inventive of inventions and most curious of curiosities.