Categories
Uncategorized

Took The Roof Off

The idea that a tornado could take the roof clean off sounds like an exaggeration — but there’s ample evidence that’s exactly what happened here. These photos were from the 1950s at the latest — 1920s at the earliest — all of which are on the early side when it comes to rural infrastructure in […]

Categories
Uncategorized

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, […]

Categories
Uncategorized

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 […]

Categories
Uncategorized

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 […]

Categories
Uncategorized

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 […]

Categories
Uncategorized

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]

Categories
Uncategorized

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 […]

Categories
Uncategorized

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 […]

Categories
Uncategorized

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 […]

Categories
Uncategorized

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 […]