Hill Farms of Vermont | Photos by Richard W. Brown
With The Last of the Hill Farms, one of New England’s premier landscape photographers goes back to his roots.
By Heather Marcus|Feb 19 2018|
Miller Farm, Peacham, 1971.
Photo Credit: Richard W. BrownOver the course of his 45-year career, photographer Richard W. Brown has traveled all around the world and seen more than 25 books of his photographs published in the U.S., Europe, and Japan. But his most recent project brings everything back home, literally: In The Last of the Hill Farms: Echoes of Vermont’s Past, Brown has collected 90 black-and-white images from his early days living in and photographing Vermont farms in the state’s rural Northeast Kingdom.
Photo Credit : Richard W. Brown
The book, published late in 2017 by Boston-based independent David R. Godine, is filled with portraits of hardscrabble farms and the people who worked them — haunting, elegiac images of buildings and landscapes that have all but vanished today. There’s Theron Boyd of Quechee, photographed in 1977 in the same farmhouse where he was born in 1901; there are John and Gladys Somers of West Barnet, standing in the doorway of their barn in West Barnet, their faces and hands speaking of a lifetime of work.
“I hope readers will see I had such high regard for the people I photographed,” Brown says in the January/February issue of Yankee, which features a photo essay drawn from The Last of the Hill Farms. “I really liked them and felt that what they were doing was a beautiful thing, even though I don’t think they thought of it that way.”
The following are some additional images from Brown’s book. See more in the photo essay “The Last of the Hill Farms,” in the January/February 2018 issue of Yankee.
HILL FARMS OF VERMONT | Additional Photos by Richard W. Brown
Photo Credit : Richard W. Brown
Photo Credit : Richard W. Brown
Photo Credit : Richard W. Brown
Photo Credit : Richard W. Brown
Photo Credit : Richard W. Brown
Photo Credit : Richard W. Brown
Photo Credit : Richard W. Brown
Photo Credit : Richard W. Brown
Photo Credit : Richard W. Brown
To see more of Brown’s work, visit his website or rwbrownphotography.com.
SEE MORE:
A Lifetime of Vermont People | Featured Photographer Peter Miller
Life at Sea | Photographs by Joel Woods
Winter in Vermont | Photos by Kevin Armstrong
reminds me of my grandparents who lived for many years in a cabin on the rock river in illinois. no indoor water, just a hand pump. no electricity for many years. my father when he was 17 saved the lives of some drunks who broke through the ice on the river. i loved visiting the cabin and family . it was apparently located on an indian burial site (before such places were protected). my grandparents were often digging up arrowheads and tomahawk heads when they gardened.
i thoroughly enjoy your photos and sentiment.
My father owned a small feed mill in rural central Pennsylvania from 1941 to 1976. These pictures bring back so many memories when I, as a young boy, would ride along with the truck drivers as they made their deliveries. What I remember most is the sense of honor these people had. Seed and fertilizer would go out in the spring with only a handshake, and my father wouldn’t get paid till the harvest. But he always got paid, even if the harvest was bad and there was probably little left for the farmer. Sadly, most of these small operations are gone, incorporated into larger farms or used for tract housing. I love to look at old pictures, and these hold a special interest for me.
I bought Richard Brown’s “Last of the Hill Farms” as soon as I became aware of it (through “Yankee Mag”). Growing up as a 6th generation Vermonter in the 1950s on a farm in the rural countryside reminiscent of these photographs, I was immediately struck with the vivid impact of a time and place and people long forgotten. While my own circumstance were slightly more 20th century than those of the images in the book, the culture of small family farms was similar. To revisit that time and those places through this book is an intense treat in nostalgia.
Mr. Brown, fantastic photographs , beautiful subjects…I got lost in each of your photos….thankyou for sharing them…