Many a historian and idle daydreamer has wished for a time machine. Unfortunately, we are destined to satisfy our curiosity with what past generations have left us: the yellowed clippings, the fragile photographs, and the fading memories that we often encounter in our quest to connect the past to the present. Today, we will do the next best thing: step into some newly revealed photos of old Rawsonville.

In the case of old photographs, the great equalizer is time and neglect -- by which any old photo, no matter how insignificant at the time it was taken, has a similar chance at achieving historical value. Today, we will examine a few previously unseen photos from the American Airlines freight agents' office at Willow Run Airport, taken in the early 1950s.

A ghost town has the power to linger on in its own absence -- perhaps through the continued use of a place name, the passing-down of oral legend, or the persistence of wooded hills and feral fallows, cloaking mysterious features that only the legend can explain. Here we take an excursion to such a site.

Shrouded by the wooded shoulder of a busy blacktop road, a forgotten mill dam retains the flow of a small stream -- as well as the fading summer memories of a generation of truant children.

In a previous post, we explored the first part of a photo album that chronicled a young woman's journey to and from the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition in 1909. Our traveler, who remains unidentified, then returned to her life in pre-war New York, where she worked at the Brooklyn Public Library from at least 1910 to 1918, presumably as a librarian.

There is something tragic about a set of personal photos that are abandoned by those who loved them, and are later found offering themselves to a stranger for a low price. For a treasured album to be found anywhere but in the care of a family member suggests that, perhaps, something did not go according to plan.