Upper Mississippi Valley Digital Image Archive

DLynskey · December 6, 2010

For a large collection of old midwestern photos browse the collection above:

Search for autos, cars, fire engines, etc. to narrow it down, but you'll find interesting pictures of farms, businesses, stores, and mostly portraits. Many of them are from the Oscar Grossheim collection belonging to the Musser Public Library in Muscatine, Iowa. Grossheim was a prolific professional photographer in the early 20th century and the Musser library has 55,000 original glass plate negatives of which several thousand have been printed and a portion of those digitalized and on the UMV website. When I lived in Muscatine I spent a number of hours going through the prints and they are of a very high quality.

Check out photos of the following rare cars:

Littlemac, a Bantam-sized car and the Frederickson, both built in Muscatine:

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Gale, built in Galesburg, IL:

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Mora:

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and one of my favorites, a new Franklin?

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I hope these links work. If not the site is easy to search.

Don