Antique & Vintage Postcards

A Caterpillar crawler tractor — number 486 emblazoned on the first bright-yellow hopper — hauls a long train of sugar cane wagons along a raised levee dike stretching to the flat horizon of the Florida Everglades, the enormous loads of cut cane spilling over the tops of each car against a hand-tinted linen sky of cobalt and peach. This is the working landscape of the United States Sugar Corporation at Clewiston, Florida, which in the 1930s and 1940s transformed the muck soils of the southern Everglades into one of the largest sugar-producing operations in North America. The card was produced by the Genuine Curteich-Chicago "C.T. Art-Colortone" process — the gold standard of linen-era postcard printing — and carries catalog number 7B-H1400, dating it firmly to the late 1930s or very early 1940s. The reverse text notes that during harvest season, wagon trains like this one carried cane to loading hoists where it was transferred to railroad cars for the trip to the sugar house at Clewiston. A penciled "2" (likely a dealer lot or price notation) appears on the back. Unused and unaddressed.