Ethan McCue’s photographs are a treasured and nostalgic nod to days gone by. Behind the lens of his camera, the Kearny County native captured the spirit of rural America during the 1930s and 40s.
Born April 13, 1917 in a farmhouse in Southside Township, McCue was the son of Elbert and Mary Alice Keys McCue who had moved from Finney County to Kearny County the previous year. Ethan was educated in primary grades in a one-room school on the South Side. When he was 14 years of age, his family moved to a different farm south of Deerfield. His father bought him a Model T Ford to drive into town for high school, and he graduated from Deerfield High School in 1934 in a class of five.
Upon the recommendation of his father who was serving on the school board at the time, McCue took his first salaried work as a teacher at the one-room Prairie View School. This school was located north of Deerfield next to the Amazon Irrigation Ditch. While teaching, Ethan purchased his single-lens reflex camera which used a mirror and prism system allowing him to view through the lens and compose exactly what would be captured on the film negative. Besides his local reputation as a capable young educator and impressive baritone singer at public events, Ethan became known during the following decade as a creator of images around Kearny County. Small prints from his black and white negatives were given as gifts and sent in letters. McCue carefully mounted his best prints in a leatherette album grouped by theme, but none were labeled or dated. None of his negatives from 1937 to 1947 survive.
Ethan’s album also contains a handful of prints made by other photographers, including one undated studio portrait of Ethan. In 1939, the Greyhound Bus line offered an unlimited travel deal on the national system for $99. That summer, Ethan traveled coast-to-coast with his camera visiting the New York World’s Fair, Atlantic City, Niagara Falls, his mother’s birthplace in Appalachian Ohio, the San Francisco International Exposition, and the McCues’ long-time hired man Anthony Lumsden who had returned to his native Virginian mountains after two decades working in agriculture in Kearny County.
Most of the historical value of Ethan McCue’s album is his documentation of rural agriculture in southwest Kansas when horsepower was being replaced rapidly by motor-driven equipment. He had a great interest in engines and was celebrated for his ability to analyze problems and to get them up and running again after breakdowns. Ethan’s photographs during that era often depict state-of-the art farm equipment and new techniques. He was not interested in romantic image-making that depicted old-fashioned practices. Curiously, McCue presented no images celebrating irrigation with water drawn from the Arkansas River. Ethan’s nights spent out alone as a teenager controlling the waters to irrigate the high-value crops must have encouraged him in his studies to forge his own desired career outside of agriculture.
Primary sources don’t inform Ethan’s descendants about many details of McCue’s life during his decade as a southwest Kansas photographer. For example, his family does not know where he spent one summer, between teaching terms, horseback as a cowboy on a ranch. He did get teaching positions at Sharon Springs and in Cimarron, and in 1947, he finally earned his four-year degree at Kansas State Teachers College in Emporia. This enabled him to move to Denver where he remained the rest of his life as an educator in the public schools. In June 1948 at Emporia, he married his college sweetheart, Mildred Haag of Lyon County.
After Ethan and Mildred settled in Denver, his passion for documentary photography cooled and he went on to explore other interests. McCue continued to use his SLR camera for recording family activity, but he did not use it in the ways he had back in Kansas. He became most interested in horticulture, carpentry, and in audio recording using reel-to-reel tape recorders. Those were his most notable creative outlets during his life in Colorado. McCue died at his Boulder home in 2005.
This week’s story comes to you from Ethan’s son, Michael, of Asheville, NC. Mike kindly reached out to the Kearny County Museum and graciously provided us with an album of Ethan’s photographs. The photos are in the public domain and may be used when respectfully credited with the following credit line: Ethan R. McCue (1917 – 2005) photographer, Kearny County album 1937 – 1947. The photos pictured here are a few samplings from the album.
