[Photo Album]: Rural Central New Jersey during World War One by CRUSER, Fred Voorhees

New Jersey. Softcover. Near Fine. Tall octavo. Flexible cloth. Modest edgewear on the boards, very good or better. Contains 80 black and white or sepia-toned gelatin silver photographs. Images are various sizes but most are approximately 4.5" x 3.5" mostly mounted two to the page. Some modest fading on some of the images, but largely very good to near fine. Several are captioned. A circa 1914-1917 well-photographed album of mostly rural images set at a farm in Central New Jersey with identified photographs of Allentown, Freehold, Old Tennent Church in Tennent, and Sea Girt; and with a few in Newark, New Jersey. Laid in is a partially printed "Degree of Flora" awarded to Fred Voorhees Cruser from the state Grange, who seems to be the central figure in the album. Cruser was born in 1896 and lived in Hopewell. Most of the images are on the family farm, and feature images of people plowing with tractors, horse drawn hay wagons, men bundling asparagus outside of a barn, building a root cellar, hoeing in the field, harvesting fruit from a tree, and posing in the barnyard, and one of four girls posing after playing tennis. There are several images of troops training at Camp Edge, as well as Governor Walter Edge's "Summer White House", all in Sea Girt in 1917. There are also images of a National Guard unit on parade on Decoration Day, 1917 in Hopewell, New Jersey, as well as the headstones of the graves of Voorhees family members. Among other interesting images are a few of young men clowning around, including two action shots of the same man (presumably Fred) jumping, a wonderful image of an African-American man (possibly a messenger) beside his motorcycle, and two images of an ice storm in 1915. An especially nice album with pleasing images set in rural central New Jersey. Cruser applied for the draft in 1918, but we are not sure whether he was enlisted. He died in 1924 at the age of 28.