When I was about 12 years old, I went on a planned trip with another family to the Campbellsport area. I’ll never forget that weekend because I saw what basically was a treasure chest that was either given away for free, or, thrown away.

Our weekend included watching motocross races, a tractor pull and attending a farm auction.

I didn’t know much about motocross. It was the first, and only, event of that type I’ve ever attended. In fact, I thought the tractor pull was much more fun.

The tractor pull was strictly for antique tractors and the “weight” the tractors pulled was a sled that people stepped onto as the tractor made its way along the pull. I was involved in this event, serving as one of the “weights.”

It was lots of fun and I bet this sled-weight model is still used in places for antique farm tractor pulls.

The motocross event and tractor pull were on a Saturday and the auction was on a Sunday. The treasure that I mentioned earlier was unveiled on Sunday.

The farm auction included everything from a family farm. There were all sorts of antique tools and implements. Even at age 12 I understood these things were unique.

I did not understand their value. And in the case of some unique items that had been put in an old trunk and marked “free,” nobody understood their value.

In the trunk were photographs. Not just any photographs, but really old photographs. While the auction progressed, I remember sitting down next to this chest, drinking a pop and paging through this dusty collection of black-and-white images from the 1800s.

I did not know the people in the photos. There were a lot of them. It was obvious that most of these photos dated back to the very early days of photographic reproduction.

Of particular interest to me, because I liked “Army men,” were two volumes of photos of soldiers from the Civil War era. These volumes included photos of all the soldiers in a particular company of Wisconsin volunteers for the Union.

I paged through the volumes and looked at pages of 2-by-4 inch “mug shots” of soldiers, with their names and ranks scrawled below each photo. I no longer remember the name of the unit or any of the other details of the items. I only remember what I saw in a very general way.

Earlier that year I had walked past a garage sale in Janesville one day on my way home from school and there was a “free” box. I guess at that age I was not a person to pass up a bargain — or junk that I thought was cool — because a neatly packaged, plug-in electric razor was in the box. I decided to take it home.

As soon as my dad saw me coming through the door with the razor, he asked what I had and where I had gotten it. Obviously, he thought I was up to something nefarious and after hearing my explanation he must have thought, “What in the world is a 12-year-old going to do with a 1950’s electric razor?” So, he told me to take it back to the garage sale and return it to the free bin, which I did.

As I looked at that trunk-full of photos, I wanted to take them all home. My experience with the electric razor and also possibly having to explain to my friend’s parents what I wanted with someone else’s photographs made me shy away from carrying off these volumes of black-and-white photographs.

Some 20 years later, I was watching Antiques Roadshow on PBS. One of the items I saw was one of these volumes of photographs from a Civil War unit of Wisconsin volunteers. The appraiser talked about how unique it was, how few of them existed and then discussed the value. From what I recall, the insurance value of the volume was $100,000.

I don’t know if what I saw at that farm auction in Campbellsport was of the same value and quality of the item appraised. However, it looked similar. I still wonder to this day what happened to those old photographs. I’m guessing if nobody took them during the auction, they were put in the trash at the end of the day.

This is how things get lost to time. They’re overlooked, forgotten and they disappear.

I wonder what would have happened if I could have somehow kept those two volumes of photographs. Maybe nothing… Perhaps they weren’t as valuable as the set of photos I saw.

On the other hand, maybe they were a one-of-a-kind treasure that should be in the Wisconsin Historical Society or a local museum.

It’s one of many personal mysteries I’ve gathered in my years growing up in Wisconsin.

— Matt Johnson is publisher of the Monroe Times. His column is published Wednesdays.