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, […]
Author Archives: Derek Dahlsad
Fertile Business Card
Earnie Askelson lived in the small city of Fertile, MN, one of the larger stops between Fargo and Grand Forks along US 75. During the 1950s, Thorkelson & Jacobs was an implement dealer, catering to the huge farming community in the region. As you might notice, firm lines weren’t drawn between the types of machines […]
More 1960s Halloween
Sing along with me: “One of these things is not like the other; one of these things is not quite the same…” I really hope this photo was taken around Halloween, otherwise Gunther has got some ‘splaining to do. If you look closely, he didn’t just grab some kid’s mask and put it on for […]
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 […]
Scary House In The Woods
I really don’t have any proof that this house is haunted, or contains a murderer, or was built on an indigenous-peoples burial ground, but it sure looks Halloweeny. [more photos in this series]
Halloween in the 1960s
Greetings from Vintage Halloween, 1960s! This came from a set of slides that belonged to a family living on a West-Central Minnesota farm during the mid-20th-century. I’m not exactly sure what school this was — Georgetown, maybe Felton — but it’s quite a flashback to see schools letting the kids dress up for Halloween in […]
The Idelkope Building
Built almost a century ago, the Idelkope Building has sat across from the Ford Manufacturing Plant, diagonal from the Great Northern Railway Station, and just north of, of course, a bar. In its earliest years, it was a food store, its later years, a bookstore, and now it’s a jogging store. My, how times change […]
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 […]