maybe post over at r/whatisthisthing

I'm having a bit of trouble nailing down the precise model of the camera. It was manufactured by the Rochester Optical Company in Rochester, NY. They had two different lines of cameras that they manufactured around the turn of the 20th century - Poco and Premo. It appears to be a "Cyclone", which was manufactured under both labels. This is from the 1902 Premo catalog, and this is from the 1903 Poco catalog. They made them in a couple of different sizes, so I presume your example is just a bit different than the one that is pictured in the catalogs. Whichever one it is, it doesn't appear in the 1910 Premo catalog.

This is right about the same time as the Brownie box cameras by Kodak was released, which went on to become immensely popular. Your camera appears to use plates, which I'm not terribly familiar with operationally. The spool wound roll film that the Brownies used was a lot easier to use, and ultimately that was the technology that became dominant until the "daylight loading cartridge" (aka 135 or "35mm") almost completely supplanted it in the 1950's-1960's.