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Trip Around The North Sea, 1927.

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In the 1920s, the American Farm Bureau Federation toured northern Europe; this was the map of their travels. From The Bureau Farmer, September, 1927.

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Family Walk, 1930s.

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Family out for a walk, consisting of a boy, a mother and child, and two older ladies, on a windy day. 1930s. From this set.

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Bemidji At Night, 1916.

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Bemidji, Minnesota: home of Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox, but the giant pair were still twenty years away when this postcard was mailed in 1916. In the 1910s, it was still a community on the grow, trying to develop roads and railroad access. A new depot was built a few years earlier than when this postcard was mailed and railway passengers were probably one of the main customers of such mementos of midwest travels. Cameras of the time were not particularly efficient at night, so this photo was probably a daytime photo that was underexposed and colored to make it look like ‘night’. In the 1910s, Either Third street has changed significantly, or the view is from a different spot: Google Maps doesn’t help.

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Girl And Puppy, 1930s.

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Baby and curly-haired white pupply, probably a bischon frise. Appears 1930s, from this set.

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Broken Children’s Glasses, 1945.


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These glasses were purchased at a flea market in July, 2008. The seller had no information about them, but the fact that they had been stored in situ for sixty years — and the note to prove that fact even moreso — intrigued me enough to purchase them.

These are a child’s-sized pair of glasses with very little wear. I imagine that, due to their width, the child was under 5 years old. The right lens has a dramatic impact point just to the outside edge of center, which would indicate (to my uneducated eye) that the child had fallen forwards, and turned their head to the left to diffuse the impact, but not fast enough. The glasses hit the ground first, pushing in the right nosepad and exploding the glass into an orb-weaver’s handicraft of cracks. As the head kept moving, the nosepad pressed in as far as it could, the lens flexed down the center line in the now-weakened glass and created a crescent-moon crack from top to bottom.

The proud parents of this future baby-boomer weren’t about to erase this momentous occasion from history: the glasses were marked with the date of the event, placed in their glasses-case, and kept for posterity. May 10th, 1945, will go down in infamy as the day Junior fell down and broke his new pair of glasses.

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Meeting With A Buffalo, 1910s.

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“A Terrible Meeting With A Buffalo”, from The Book of Knowledge, 1910s. Caption text here.

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Downtown Fire, 1948.

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Located in the Grand Forks area (based on other photos in the set), a brick building is consumed by fire, 1948.

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Dalmatian and Woman, 1950s.

Woman sitting on a bench, in a yard, with a dog that looks somewhat like a dalmatian, or a setter of some sort; probably a mutt. Appears 1950s.

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Blonde Outdoors, 1920s.

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Blonde baby, enjoying the outdoors, near what appears to be a Model T. 1920s. From this set.

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Jack’s Wonderful House, 1910s.

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A whimsical interpretation of the human body as a house, with Jack’s study at the top, and various windows and doors for sensory input to enter through. From a series of articles in The Book of Knowledge, 1910s. The articles may be an adaptation of this book, although I was unable to find any direct one-for-one quotes in The Book of Knowledge.