Franklin Booth was born in 1874 in Clarksville, Indiana. Living on a forty-acre farm, he began drawing images of farm animals, buildings, and rural scenes at an early age. He studied illustrations in schoolbooks and magazines, and, mistaking the woodcut-produced engraving lines for lines drawn by pen, practiced reproducing each line with pen-and-ink. Booth also discovered perspective when observing a fence descending into the distance. After graduating from Union Academy, a local Quaker high school, Booth decided to continue working on the farm, pitching wheat and plowing corn during the day, while drawing at night. As Booth labored, he observed his natural surroundings and contemplated how to evoke them in drawing. His ability to capture the blazing summer sunlight, cool shade under trees, soft cloudscapes, and sweeping expanses of terrain reflect an acute understanding of his rural environs. As Booth stated in an interview, “my greatest lessons in art were when I worked on a plow or with the hoe in a field alone…I do not like to follow the other fellow’s idea. I like to think out an original idea myself. That’s why I think my farm life was valuable to me. There while working day after day in a field I learned to really think.”