Pioneer Girl's Journal

Saloma Olds received a journal on her 14th birthday and began to write about life on Marco Island, Florida in the early 1900's. Her diary allows a rare glimpse into the lives of children of pioneers as they lived through illness, death, hurricanes, World War I, and the poverty of the island at the turn of the last century.
Saloma illustrates her writing with photos taken with her Brownie camera on film she developed herself when she had ice. "Cold water didn't work too well" she wrote and our family didn't have ice often enough.
She wrote about her parents: the first medical doctors on the island, her two sisters, Orida and Rosalie, her companions in all that happened to her. She wrote about the Islanders and the wealthy tourists who came to visit while wintering in the hotels of Naples or Marco. Names such as: Doxsee, Collier, Eubank, Haldemann, Hamills, Weeks, Addison, and Barfield mingle with the likes of Dimock, Pinchot, Coffin, Hornaday, Keely and Fabricious. Saloma recorded everything with growing awareness and increasing insight. Intimate family details are described in her old fashioned grammar and often misspelled or scratched out words.
It is a miracle this teen age girl's journal and photographs survived the ravages of rain, floods, hurricanes and time to explain the world she lived in.
You can see her diary and photographs on display today at the Marco Island Historical Museum... 100 years later.