Victorian chromolithograph trade card for Gale Manufacturing Company of Albion, Michigan — depicting a grotesquely comic "Potato Bug" figure: a portly gentleman with a potato for a body, top hat, green coat, plaid trousers, and a cane, strolling past a farm field where a worker labors in the background. The Colorado potato beetle was the great agricultural scourge of the 1880s, and Gale's farm implements — the "Big Injun" 3-Wheel Sulky Plow and Gale Chilled Hand Plows — were sold to farmers fighting both soil and pest. Printed in 1887 by J.H. Bufford's Sons of Boston, one of the premier chromolithography firms in America, the card achieves a quality of color and draftsmanship that makes it a fine example of the Victorian trade card at its height. Gale Manufacturing was a significant Michigan agricultural implements maker, and cards of this series are actively collected by both farm implement and Victorian ephemera collectors.

• Caption: "Potato Bug" — "BIG INJUN" 3-Wheel Sulky Plow. "GALE" Chilled Hand Plows. Gale Man'f'g Co. — Albion, Mich.
• Publisher: Gale Man'f'g Co., Albion, Michigan
• Photographer: J.H. Bufford's Sons, Boston (lithographer)
• Status: Unposted