Until well into the twentieth century, agriculture played a dominant role in the economy of Mecklenburg, a region northwest of Berlin, along the Baltic Sea. Since the Kaiserreich period, non-noble businessmen had begun purchasing some of the noble estates, as the leather manufacturer Hermann G. Schmid did in 1916, when he took over the Groß Görnow estate shown in this photograph. Despite this change in ownership and the larger social upheavals of the 1918/19 Revolution, however, many seasonal aspects of the estate’s operations continued as they had long done, with large numbers of agricultural laborers doing the farming and tending to the horses. These two photographs were taken in the fall of 1928 and show the Schmid family with the estate employees. The first picture was taken during the harvest festival [Erntedank] at the farm, when the lords of the manor traditionally treated their maids and farmhands to food and harvest beer. The second picture shows the family and their staff in front of the traditional harvest crown.