All Over Albany

Peeling apples

We stumbled across this image -- of a man using a device to peel an apple -- in the digital collections of the NYS Archives and it made us smile. It's like Magritte got hungry and decided it was time to eat the apple.

From the accompanying description:

New York. Schoharie. Old Fort. Man operating Apple parer apparatus. Stone structure and vine foliage in background, n.d.

We're guessing "Old Fort" is The Old Stone Fort. The image is from a collection of "lantern slides" that spanned 1856-1939. (So, maybe this is from the late 19th century.)

By the way: Here's more about those lantern slides, from the NYS Archives:

Lantern slides were compiled, mostly between 1911 and 1939, as instructional aids for the public school curriculum. More than 20,000 unique images dating from 1856-1939 document a wide variety of subjects, including New York State, North American and world geography, history, natural sciences, fine arts, trades, industries, education, and schools. The photographs were reproduced in the form of lantern slides for use in classrooms. Thousands of slides were produced by the Division of Visual Instruction and sets of slides were loaned to schools throughout the State from 1886 to 1939.

The digital collection online includes a bunch of the slides. Here's another apple-related image -- piles and piles of apples in Niagara County in 1911.

photo: NYS Archives