Victorian Halloween: Black-Face

Helene and Mrs. Faucher had the best of intentions when they dressed up for Halloween, 1916, in blackface — little did they know that, ninety-one years later, people from all over the world will be sending off disgusted electronical-correspondences to a writer in North Dakota who published their photo for everyone to see. No, please, […]

Brick Building By the Railroad Tracks

The back of a nicely-made brick building, in an unknown town. Excellent brickwork, ball finial at the corner, backing the railroad — but no identifying signs on this site. I did my best, scanning and rescanning at highest resolution, using PShop tricks to try and coax out the words on the overhang, on the far […]

Stay At The Auto-House

This funny little tin house is a throwback to an earlier time — one before houses were automatically assigned a wide-open, roofed, cement-floored siamese twin known as a ‘garage’. When people started buying cars they needed someplace to put them, and one of the competitors in the ‘automobile storage kit’ was the Rusk Auto-House, an […]

Minnesota Kaiser – 1947

My great-uncle (not the guy in the picture) had a Kaiser Frazer — he owned it until he needed to clear out his farmstead, at which time the Frazer moved out to my uncle’s farm, where it has sat for almost twenty years now, progressively and slowly turning into a pile of rusty dust. Kaiser […]

Look At Old Chicago

Think you know Chicago? This map will probably interest you. Live in old Chicago? You can probably see your house from here. Distributed for the 1893 World’s Exhibition, on this side it shows an entire map of Chicago — which, in pre-automobile-times, was probably as difficult to cross as it is to travel across entire […]