Photograph by Arthur Rothstein

In August 1935, Farm Security Administration photographer Arthur Rothstein turned his camera toward Winslow, Arkansas, and captured a small mountain town whose life was closely tied to the railroad.

Winslow sits high in Washington County’s Boston Mountains. The railroad’s arrival in the late nineteenth century transformed what had been an isolated mountain area into a community connected to Fayetteville, Fort Smith, and the wider world. By the 1930s, trains still passed directly through the heart of town, carrying freight, passengers, mail, and much of the commerce upon which places like Winslow depended.

Rothstein’s photograph shows that relationship plainly. Railroad tracks dominate the foreground. Beyond them stands a row of modest commercial buildings, including a feed business advertising hay, grain, flour, and feed—the ordinary necessities of an agricultural community. A railroad crossing sign, stacked crates, utility poles, storefronts, and the surrounding hills complete the scene.

There is nothing dramatic happening. That is precisely what makes the photograph valuable.

Rothstein was documenting America during the depths of the Great Depression, but his photographs were not always pictures of obvious poverty or disaster. Often, they recorded the everyday landscape where people lived and worked. Winslow appears neither prosperous nor ruined. It simply looks like a small Arkansas town going about its business during difficult years.

The photograph also preserves something increasingly difficult to imagine: a time when the railroad wasn’t on the edge of town. It was part of the town itself.

For the people of Winslow in 1935, those tracks connected them to the rest of Arkansas and to a much larger America beyond the Boston Mountains.