[Ten Original Photographs of McAllen and the Rio Grande Valley]

[McAllen, Tx, 1920. Very good.. Ten original photographs, each 5 x 7 inches. Light wear at edges. Captioned in negative. Contemporary pencil initials on versos. A rare group of ten original photographs by early 20th-century Texas photographer John Peter Esklidsen, who worked in the Rio Grande Valley in the 1910s and 1920s. The photographs present here were produced by the Eskildsen Studio of McAllen, Texas, and showcase the booming Valley during the 1920s. They show bountiful fields of cabbage, alfalfa, and onions (and in one case, the African American laborers who made it all possible), a grapefruit tree bent to the ground under the weight of its abundant fruit, fields of grass-fed pigs and dairy cattle, a newly built farm house captioned "New Eden," and a major irrigation canal. The images are titled in the negatives as follows:

1. Grapefruit in the Dr. Kalbfleisch Orchard.
2. A Magic Valley Cabbage Field.
3. 100 Rhodes-Grass Raised Duroc-Jerseys in the Bruce Young Farm. San Juan Tex.
4. Irrigating Cabbage and Onions in the Valley.
5. Mercedes. Main Canal.
6. Llano Grand Lake and Stewart Club House.
7. 5th Cutting Alfalfa on the Johnson Farm, June 17, '20.
8. Dairy Herd in Sudan Grass - Rio Grande Valley.
9. A Farm in the Valley.
10. "New Eden" - The 6 Months Old Lentz Farm House.

We locate a few individual prints by Eskildsen in the photo collections of UT Rio Grande Valley and SMU, none present here.