Original Items: Only One Grouping Available. Now this is an interesting little grouping. This is a lovely assortment of personal items that would have been found in a soldiers’ kit before and during the Spanish-American war. Though not everything in a soldiers’ kit are “creature comforts”, some items were a necessity like a sewing kit and stuff to protect you from the elements, all of which is in this grouping!

The Items In This Grouping:
- Bloch Brothers Tobacco Company, “Whalen Scrap For Chewing” Mail Pouch Tobacco: Now this is a fantastic item, especially for how old it is and the condition. The packaging is still full of tobacco. The Bloch Brothers Tobacco Company (formerly the Helme Tobacco Company) of Wheeling, West Virginia was a tobacco company founded by brothers Aaron and Samuel Bloch in 1879. It was best known for its Mail Pouch chewing tobacco. Mail Pouch was a popular chew advertised on over 20,000 barns, most of which were located in the rural Ohio River Valley. Each barn had an end or side painted with the familiar Mail Pouch lettering and advertising, "Treat yourself to the best."

The brothers began manufacturing cigars in 1879 as a side-line to Samuel Bloch's wholesale grocery business. It was discovered that the left-over cigar clippings could be flavored and packaged in a paper bag, and then sold. Mail Pouch chewing tobacco is still produced by Swisher International Group.

- Schinasi Brothers Natural Cigarettes Packaging With Cigarette: This is another fantastic item but one that is much later than the rest of the items, it is dated 1909.

- Scarf: Another fantastic item. We believe this to have been a silk scarf of sorts, most likely an item to protect the wearer from the elements such as the sun.

- Sewing Kit: Now this is a fantastic piece of kit! When I (Paddy) was in the Marine Corps, one of the basis of our foundations is the pride in our proper military appearance, our uniforms playing a huge role in that. You couldn’t always take your uniforms to a tailor to have repairs done, so you had to learn how to “survive” sewing items yourself. These kits, which were usually modified to adjust to the user’s needs, are always packed full of buttons, threads and other items specific to fit your uniform needs, in this case it was for a soldier in the regular Army.

- x2 Stereo Cards For Stereoscope: This is an amazing pair of stereo cards! One of the pictures shows soldiers “In the trenches on San Juan Hill near Santiago, Cuba, the other image is “a thousand boys in blue on S.S. Rio de Janeiro bound for Manila”.

A stereoscope is a device for viewing a stereoscopic pair of separate images, depicting left-eye and right-eye views of the same scene, as a single three-dimensional image.

A typical stereoscope provides each eye with a lens that makes the image seen through it appear larger and more distant and usually also shifts its apparent horizontal position, so that for a person with normal binocular depth perception the edges of the two images seemingly fuse into one "stereo window". In current practice, the images are prepared so that the scene appears to be beyond this virtual window, through which objects are sometimes allowed to protrude, but this was not always the custom. A divider or other view-limiting feature is usually provided to prevent each eye from being distracted by also seeing the image intended for the other eye.

Most people can, with practice and some effort, view stereoscopic image pairs in 3D without the aid of a stereoscope, but the physiological depth cues resulting from the unnatural combination of eye convergence and focus required will be unlike those experienced when actually viewing the scene in reality, making an accurate simulation of the natural viewing experience impossible and tending to cause eye strain and fatigue.

Although more recent devices such as Realist-format 3D slide viewers, the View-Master or virtual reality headsets are also stereoscopes, the word is now most commonly associated with viewers designed for the standard-format stereo cards that enjoyed several waves of popularity from the 1850s to the 1930s as a home entertainment medium.

Devices such as polarized, anaglyph and shutter glasses which are used to view two actually superimposed or intermingled images, rather than two physically separate images, are not categorized as stereoscopes.

A beautiful grouping that comes more than ready for further research and display.