97.528.1

Dining quarters (mess hall) in a lumber camp near Akeley, Minnesota, in 1905. Harry F. Brown, father of Farwell T. Brown, is the man, pouring himself some coffee, seated in the left of the photograph directly in front of a waiter. Harry Brown was the manager of the business office of the Red River Lumber Company. As bookkeeper, he wrote the paychecks for all the employees at this camp. The mess is much larger than this photograph indicates. In 1905, Harry Brown was working on a master's degree at Iowa State College under the direction of Professor Louis Hermann Pammel, on the topic of the cost of lumbering in Minnesota. He took the bookkeeping job as a way to finance his academic data collection.