Sally MacNamara Ivey “has read more than 10,000 unpublished diaries and spent 35 years collecting them…. Whenever MacNamara Ivey has had pocket change, it’s gone to purchasing diaries. Back in the late ’90s, when she and her husband were raising four kids with the money she brought in waiting tables and he made working at the local mill, she bought a diary on layaway for $500 (about $900 today). It was written by a woman who attended the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. In exquisite detail, the author described the exotic events, including the devastating fire that erupted in a cold-storage building nicknamed the ‘Greatest Refrigerator on Earth’ and the wonders of this new thing called electricity.”

Read more at “A Pocket-Size Time Machine” by Lauren Silverman in the Atlantic (November 28, 2022).

The tragic Cold Storage Building fire of July 10, 1893, depicted on the cover of Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Weekly (July, 20, 1893).