History often remembers wars, elections and famous people.

Jack Delano remembered dinner.

He remembered tired farmers. Children standing beside their parents. Kitchens where meals were prepared after a long day in the fields. Families whose names have largely faded but whose faces remain as vivid today as they were in December 1940.

Working for the federal Farm Security Administration (FSA) during the Great Depression, Delano traveled across Rhode Island documenting the lives of farmers and working families. His photographs from that month include scenes from Portsmouth, Little Compton, Tiverton, Newport, Johnston, Wickford, Foster and North Kingstown.

Taken together, they form an extraordinary portrait of a Rhode Island that has largely disappeared.

One photograph shows Dennis DeCosta, a Portuguese farmer in Little Compton, standing beside his wife and children inside their kitchen. According to the Library of Congress caption, the family grew vegetables and raised about a dozen cows.

DeCosta’s face immediately draws the eye. Weathered and solemn, he appears worn by the demands of farming during the waning years of the Depression. The photograph doesn’t tell us what he was thinking, but it hardly needs to. His expression speaks for itself.

Another image transports us into the kitchen of the Ilullo family in Portsmouth. One of Mr. Ilullo’s daughters stands at a counter preparing spaghetti and meatballs while the day’s work quietly gives way to supper.

The kitchen is unremarkable. So is the moment.

There is no parade, no public celebration, no famous visitor. Just a daughter making dinner.

Yet it is precisely that ordinariness that gives the photograph its lasting power.

At the time, Portsmouth, Little Compton and Tiverton were still agricultural communities where fields, dairy farms and truck gardens shaped both the landscape and daily life. Families worked together to grow vegetables, raise livestock and earn a living from the land.

The term “truck gardener,” used to describe Mr. Ilullo, had nothing to do with motor vehicles. It referred to farmers who raised produce for market — work that depended on favorable weather, healthy crops and countless hours of labor.

The many FSA images revealed poverty and hardship, Delano’s photographs often focused on quieter truths: family, work, resilience and the routines that carried people through difficult times.

An immigrant himself

Born in Ukraine and raised in the United States, Delano later became the official photographer for the government of Puerto Rico. Throughout his career, he had a gift for finding dignity in ordinary people.

Neither the DeCostas nor the Ilullos knew they were creating history. One family paused outside their farm. Another prepared dinner.

More than eight decades later, those ordinary moments have become extraordinary records of a Rhode Island that existed before subdivisions replaced fields and farming ceased to define much of the East Bay and SouthCoast.

Delano simply happened to arrive with a camera before that world began to disappear.