Antique & Vintage Postcards

Knee-deep in a towering green wall of sugar cane, four laborers swing machetes in the steamy Florida Everglades — a scene that speaks to the back-breaking human cost behind every spoonful of sugar produced at the United States Sugar Corporation's massive Clewiston mill. This Curteich "C.T. Art-Colortone" linen-era card, catalog number 7B-H1399, bathes the workers in vivid greens and blues that belie the grueling reality: the reverse explains that cane was "harvested by hand… with a few deft strokes of a machete," then hauled by field wagon to railroad cars. The linen texture and saturated color palette are hallmarks of the 1930s–1940s American commercial postcard golden age. The Clewiston, Florida sugar industry — and the largely migrant and Black labor force that powered it — is a significant and underrepresented chapter in American agricultural history, giving this card documentary weight beyond its tourist-souvenir origins.