Here they all all plus the letter..

They are interesting and fun to look at....but have almost no value but to someone who knows those pictured. There are lots and lots of summer vacation pictures from that ear....I could send you a bunch!!!

thanks Lindac! do you think the letter goes with them then and they are from 1902?

oops I meant 1904

I didn't read the letter....but unless it mentions an historic event it has no worth but for sentimental value to the relatives of whoever wrote it.

These have value to the family genealogist, but very little value to anyone else.

I think the date of the letter is 1909. I can't tell if it is written with ink-pen or pencil. At that date, an ink pen would have been a dip pen with ink bottle. The writter dips the nib into the ink and can write 5 to 10 words before he has to dip the pen again. Sometimes, the dipping sequence is detectable: The strokes are broad with a flooded pen and then these thin out as the ink gets used, and then the pen is dipped again and the sequnece starts over. A very practiced writer dips the pen more often and avoids flooding the nib and his penmanship is more consistent and more difficult to detect the dipping sequence.

Thomas Jefferson wrote with a fountain pen, and Wirt, a contemporary of Waterman, advertised in 1880 that there were 350,000 of their pens in use.
It's very likely that the letter was written with a fountain pen.

The Maumee River starts around Ft. Wayne, Indiana, and flowes northeast into northwestern Ohio, and flows into Lake Erie east of Toledo. There were various "campgrounds" along the Maumee as well as other rivers in Ohio, most notably the Mohican. As a Buckeye, transplanted to Texas, I know the river systems in both states.

Obviously, the earliest writings were done with a quill. I do remember learning to write script with a dip pen and our school desks had ink wells. I started first grade in 1946.

The letter was written around Christmastime, and I can tell you that those pictures weren't taken in December on the Maumee, a river I know well. Hard to tell if the pics have any correlation to the letter. They are enchanting, for sure. Camping by the river used to be a very common thing here, and people were doing it even when I was a kid. The banks were for all practical purposes used by the public, with no regard to landowners and as long as you stayed close to the water, nobody said anything. Old newspapers here speak of groups and clubs taking off for picnics on river islands and my Uncle twice removed even donated a park to the city by the river for such use. Even until the 1930s, matrons wore clothes similar to some worn by the gals in the pics, but they are obviously older because even the young woman with the baby is dressed in Victorian garb. They look authentic the letter's age to me.

Calliope, I am from Mansfield, but have lived in Texas since 1971.

Been to Mansfield a few times. My cuz lives on the Maumee near Toledo. I was born and lived on the banks of the Muskingum, and the Licking joins it in the nearby town. Ohio and its rivers. It gets in your blood, doesn't it?

From the configuration of the stars on the flag, it looks like 48....making it post 1912.

I tried to do it that way, but I could not tell....the picture is too fuzzy. If the OP can count the stars on it, then the photo date can certainly be deduced a little more closely since there was a bit of activity in that timeframe.

The letter is a poem- all the lines rhyme. Possibly just a personal poem but you could Google to see if it's been published anywhere. And the date is December 22nd, 1907.
The women's hairstyles are consistent with the early 1900s, certainly pre-World War 1.

If you live near that river you might find out if there is museum in the area & talk to folks running it. You might see other pics of same era. I learned to write (1949) with ink & nibpen then later(after my hair was cut off by mom as kid dipped my braid in ink) we got what looked like fountain pens with an ink cartridge (you put in pen-often leaked all over kids clothes) but by time I went to town schools they had ballpoint pens. So much better. Other parts of U.S. may have been using things but hadn't reached us yet. Outhouses were popular back then, too.