The WPA & the Golden Age · See America / The Parks
Rural Pennsylvania
Katherine Milhous · Work Projects Administration, 1936
What it is
A color lithograph travel poster promoting rural Pennsylvania, designed by the Philadelphia artist Katherine Milhous for the WPA and showing children from a plain-dress religious community. The Library of Congress dates it to between 1936 and 1940 and numbers it 101 in its WPA poster collection.
Why it matters
Milhous was steeped in Pennsylvania German folk design, and here she turns that vocabulary outward as tourist invitation, selling a region through the faces of its people rather than its scenery. It belongs to the New Deal poster program that put artists to work advertising America to Americans. She would later win the Caldecott Medal for The Egg Tree, another book rooted in the same Pennsylvania Dutch tradition.
What to notice
Look at the color: this is lithography, rare among WPA posters that mostly used silkscreen, and the stone gives the hues a softer grain than the flat blocks of screen printing.
A region drawn as the children it raised.
Provenance
- School
- WPA — Federal Art Project (United States)
- Designer
- Katherine Milhous
- Format
- Travel poster
- Poster published
- Work Projects Administration, 1936
- Source
- Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division · LCCN98518753 (digital ID cph.3b51486); collection no. 101
Rights: CLEAR. Public domain — U.S. government program work (WPA Federal Art Project), any year. Gated by the poster’s own publication year. Cleared by registry on 2026-07-18.
Format
The full-resolution, color-managed file — restored honestly, yours to print and keep.
Sized to protect print quality — this scan supports sizes up to 18x24" cleanly.
Size
$29.00
