Finding aid and biographical material

File — Box: 1, Folder: 1

Staff Only

Scope and Contents

From the Collection: The F.A. Pazandak Collection contains 115 images documenting the transition on a North Dakota farm from horses to steam engines to tractors, covering the period from 1908 to the 1920s. All images were taken by Mr. Pazandak on the Pazandak farms near Fullerton, N.D., in southeastern North Dakota. In addition, a hand-colored version for four of the images are included. These hand-colored images come from the Senator Milton R. Young Collection and had hung in his Senate office in Washington, D.C. He donated them, together with other photographs and artifacts, to North Dakota State University upon his retirement in 1981. In 1998 through an award from the Library of Congress, the entire collection was placed on the Library of Congress American Memory web site. The web address to access the collection is: http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/award97/ndfahtml/paz_home.html. It was through the advice and encouragement of Dr. Hiram Drache, history professor at Concordia College, Moorhead, Minn., that Mr. Pazandak's daughter, Elaine P. Rumelhart, donated in 1983 the entire collection of negatives and prints of her late father to the Institute for Regional Studies. Dr. Drache described the collection as " ... one of the best I have come across in my years of working throughout the Midwest in search of agricultural pictures. The collection has given us a better understanding of the technology of agriculture by learning what people were doing in the past." The Pazandak collection has been organized into sixteen series: Binders, Disking, Farmstead, Grain harvesting, Grain hauling, Lumber hauling, Pazandak portraits, People, Planting trees, Plowing, Repairing tractors, Road maintenance, Seeding, Threshing, Trucks, and Well drilling. These series represent specific farming operations or other activities on the farm. Because of the emphasis on mechanization on the Pazandak farms, the collection focuses upon the steam engines, tractors and other machinery used. Included are Geiser and Minneapolis steam engines, Twin City “25” and “20-35” tractors, Big-4 tractor, Hart-Parr tractor, Case “LA” tractor, International “10-20” and “15-30” tractors, as well as threshing machines, grain binders, disks, headers, grain wagons, plows, drills, road grader, and trucks. There are also several portraits of Mr. and Mrs. Pazandak, and some social scenes involving the family. The home built by Pazandak is also well documenting in images spanning some twenty years. Not all of the negatives came with corresponding prints, and thus contact prints were generated and added to the collection. Mr. Pazandak in 1969 wrote very detailed descriptions of the tractors shown in the pictures, as well as other general description notes for various images. The notes are included in the pertinent files. Detailed, item-level cataloging for each image is included on the American Memory web site.