Plowline: Images of Rural New York is a collecting initiative. The Farmers’ Museum, with the generous support of the Gipson Family, is actively assembling original photography that documents changes in agricultural practice, rural life and farming families in New York State from the 19th century through the present.

In 1942, The Farmers’ Museum’s founders set out to collect objects of American farm and rural communities and to display those in a method accessible to all interested. As we move into the 21st century, collecting agricultural equipment has become somewhat prohibitive.

Equipment and tools have become larger, a situation the founders may not have foreseen; meanwhile, the Museum’s landlocked footprint of 35 acres has remained the same.

Plowline will continue to chronicle the lives of farm families and changing agricultural practice in a broad sense even while the museum continues to selectively collect 20th and 21st century objects of agricultural history.