Two Girls, Main Street. 1920s.

Two young women standing on a sidewalk in a small rural Minnesota town, probably Revere, MN. The gas pump behind them reads, "Daniel's Independent Gasoline."

Small-Town Country Road, 1930s.

Driving through the plains or Minnesota, North Dakota, or South Dakota, many small towns still look like this today: Grain elevator, church, a handful of houses, and then just more open farmland. It's likely that buildings from the 1930s are still standing, although they're far more run-down than they looked eighty years ago. This photo was taken sometime in the mid-1930s, location unknown. (click for full image)

Revere, Minnesota, 1920

Welcome to Revere, Minnesota. Walnut Grove, where some of the Laura Ingalls Wilder books were set, is the largest town to the west, and Lamberton is the larger town to the east. All these towns are connected by US Highway 14, but the railroad was once the main way to get from here to there. Only a couple miles separate these towns, with Walnut Grove and Lamberton being larger, and Revere becoming a stopping point between the two.

During the early 1920s, however, the family of one of the residents took a bunch of photos. The photos come from the large lot of negatives I purchased last year. The people are in their twenties and thirties in the negatives I've scanned before, and in these photos they seem to be in their teens. I can't quite tell if they were visiting Revere, or if they had lived in Revere during their youth. Anyhow, the photographer in the family took lots of pictures, capturing quite a bit of Revere's downtown area.