University Place

Historic Aerial Photography in Wisconsin

Welcome, everyone, to Wednesday Nite @ the Lab. I’m Tom Zinnen, I work here at the UW-Madison Biotechnology Center. I also work for UW-Extension Cooperative Extension, and on behalf of those folks and our other co-organizers, Wisconsin Public Television, the Wisconsin Alumni Association, and the UW-Madison Science Alliance, thanks again for coming to Wednesday Nite @ the Lab. We do this every Wednesday night, 50 times a year. Tonight, it’s my pleasure to introduce to you AJ Wortley and Jaime Martindale. AJ was born in New Bern, North Carolina, went to high school in Rensselaer, Indiana, came here to UW-Madison to get a degree in civil engineering, and since 1998 has been with the State Cartographer’s Office in the world famous Science Hall, which is a National Historic Landmark. And it’s the only National Historic Landmark that has a period after hall. [laughter] And we don’t know why.

And his colleague, Jaime Martindale. She was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, graduated from South Milwaukee High School, went to UW-Milwaukee and got an undergraduate degree in conservation biology, then got her master’s degree at UW-Milwaukee in library and information sciences. She then spent two years at Cornell University at the Mann Library. And she’s been here since 2003. Both of them are in the Department of Geography, and they get to talk to us tonight about one of the more amazing projects that I didn’t know much about until recently, and that is this four-year project to photograph all of Wisconsin from 1937 to 1941. So tonight we get to hear about historic aerial photos in Wisconsin. Please join me in welcoming Jamie Martindale to Wednesday Nite @ the Lab. [applause]

– Thank you, everybody. I am really excited to be here. I’ve been a fan of the Wednesday Nite @ the Lab lecture series. This is my first chance to actually give a talk during the lecture series, so I’m really excited and thrilled to be here. Thank you for joining us for this presentation tonight. And I’m also really excited to be presenting on one of my absolute favorite subjects, which is historic aerial photography.

I manage a huge collection of aerial photos in the Map Library, which I will introduce you to and show to you, and I’m hopeful that after this hour-long presentation you’ll have the same sort of love for these images as I do. So we’ll get started. First we want to introduce ourselves to you, talk a little bit about the geography department and Science Hall. As Tom mentioned, it is an absolutely wonderful building. I think everybody that works in Science Hall feels really lucky to be able to go to work in such a beautiful place every day. And we’ll do an introduction to and overview of the aerial photograph collection in the Map Library. And then, you know, as I was learning about what it means to curate and manage collections of historic photos like this, I didn’t know a ton about it when I first started here at UW. I sort of inherited this collection, and I thought, okay, what is the origin of this? Why are these photos here? Why were they taken in the first place? And so I want to share some of that history with you because I think that story of going back to the 1930s and the New Deal and FDR’s New Deal and why these images were important then and why they’re still important today. And then, of course, we have to look at some examples.

So I want to show you some views from above. And we’ll do some comparisons of what places looked like in Wisconsin in the 1930s compared to what they look like today. And we can sort of look at that change. And then I’m going to transition the presentation over to AJ, and he’s going to talk with you about a project to digitize the oldest series of aerial images in Wisconsin, which took place from 1937 to 1941, and make those available online so that you can leave the lecture and go home and start looking at 1930s photos on your computer at home. Before I move on to the next slide, I have a series of sample aerial images sort of peppered throughout the presentation. And I’m wondering if anybody can guess what this image is showing us? So this image is taken somewhere in Wisconsin in October of 1937.

– Platteville.

– Right. This is the Platte Mound M. So this is a symbol of the College of Mining at the University of Wisconsin-Platteville. And it was constructed in 1937 by students in the College of Engineering there. And their primary goal was to create an M that was larger than the M that existed at their rival institution the Colorado School of Mines. [laughter] So they already had an M, but Platteville wanted to make a bigger M. So it’s literally the world’s largest M. And on October 16th of 1937, they lit it on fire to celebrate homecoming, which is still a tradition that they do every year at homecoming and probably for other festivities. So this is just one really great example of how you can view historic and cultural features in Wisconsin using aerial photography. So, as I mentioned, AJ and I come to you today from historic Science Hall. The current Science Hall building that we occupy is actually the second Science Hall on campus.

The very first Science Hall building was built in 1875. It was the second instructional building on the UW campus. It burned to the ground in 1884. So they built this second building. It was completed in 1888. And at one time it housed all of the sciences and engineering departments and colleges at the university. Now it basically is home to the Department of Geography and the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies. And inside Science Hall, I work in the Robinson Map Library, which is up on the third floor. We actually occupy the entire north wing of the third floor of the building.

The library was named for Professor Arthur H Robinson. He taught cartography in the geography department from 1945 until 1980. He was also not only responsible for starting the Map Library in Science Hall but he also started the UW Cartography Lab, which is still a production map facility also located in Science Hall, and the Wisconsin State Cartographer’s Office, which is also in Science Hall and part of geography. So, needless to say, there are a lot of us in Science Hall who sort of owe our careers to Professor Robinson and his legacy in the Department of Geography. The collection is pretty impressive. It’s over a half a million items in total. So about 287,000 maps, and the aerial photograph collection is the largest of its kind in the state of Wisconsin. So it’s around 260,000 individual contact prints in the collection. The earliest aerial photos were flown in 1937.

We’ll focus on that collection in this presentation today. And the latest photos we have for most places in Wisconsin are around 2000 to 2005. There are a couple of counties where we’ve got later images, but really starting in about 2004 federal imagery was basically all digital at that point. And so now, in 2017, we’re really sort of at the end of that sort of print aerial photograph era, for the most part. So, you might be wondering how people use this photography. And the photograph collection in the library is really one that’s used by a really diverse group of users. So it’s not that we can say that it’s primarily academic use or, you know, it’s really just general public interest. It’s really across the board. We have a lot of students and faculty and staff that use it obviously for academic and research projects.

But we also have a huge contingency of users that come from the private sector. So we get a lot of work or people from engineering communities, from environmental science communities. We get a lot of lawyers. So there’s a lot of legal cases that can be dealt with with aerial photos. And so these are just six examples that we see a lot, that we see users come to the library most often for. And the first one is land use or land form change studies. So obviously looking back at a place in time, and for most places in Wisconsin within our collection, you can get a snapshot every decade from the ’30s through about 2000. So you can get that, every 10 years you can see that progression of how places have changed or not changed, depending on what you’re looking for. Environmental restoration projects, so using historical photos to sort of see what the land cover in a particular place was like 80 years ago with the hopes of potentially returning it back to that, you know, more pristine state than it is today.

That’s another really good example. And site selections, this is really common for engineering consultants, environmental consultants. So any time a piece of land is set to be developed commercially, they have to do a thorough environmental history of that parcel of land before they can do any development. It’s actually called an EPA phase one assessment. And that, those site selections are done so that the developer knows the full history and what may or may not have to happen to that piece of land before development can occur. So, for example, if you pull a 1950 aerial photo and there’s a gas station in the middle of the property, there potentially could be fuel tanks underground that may have to be dealt with before commercial development can happen. And then I mentioned legal cases. There are a lot of property owners in Wisconsin that find themselves in the midst of property disputes. Rural land owners who own large tracts of land is really common to have issues with their neighbors trying to take 20 acres and adverse possession issues.

And so a lot of times aerial photos can be used to either prove or disprove, essentially, the existence of features at a given time. So if the property deed says the western boundary was this fence line, which a lot of really old property deeds sometimes do, and that fence line is no longer there, maybe the only way to prove it is to show it on a photograph. And so we do a lot of work with lawyers and their clients to find aerial photos that help them with that. And then, of course, genealogy and just personal interests. So, it’s really cool to be able to look at the place where you’re from, for example, 80 years ago on a photograph. So we get a lot of people that are just really interested in, you know, their family history and their grandparents’ farm or their great-grandparents’ farm and what it looked like 80 years ago when maybe they lived there. And it’s amazing when you see these images of these places back then and the stories that come up. And there’s this sense of place that people have. So it kind of just reminds us of how things used to be.

It’s kind of comforting in a way to be able to walk back in time. This is an example of the Milwaukee lake front in 1937. And I don’t know how, if you’re familiar at all with this area, but if I show you the 2015 version of this same area, you’ll notice it’s the Summerfest grounds. Right? You can see the Summerfest grounds. You can see 794 here. You can see this is the Hoan Bridge right here. But, essentially, this entire chunk of land that Summerfest and the Summerfest Island where the fireworks get shot off, usually for different festivals, was basically filled in and created in Lake Michigan. So, I can go back and just show you. You can kind of see where it’s literally the lake, and then it becomes a chunk of land that people go and visit by the tens of thousands every summer for different things. So, kind of cool to see that.

You can actually see the Summerfest smiley face too in the middle of the amphitheater there, which is kind of neat. Okay, so I mentioned to you that I’m sort of fascinated by the history of these photos, and I hope you are too. So, indulge me in being able to tell you this story because I think the historic nature of why these photos exist is kind of an interesting thing. And Wisconsin kind of plays an interesting role in that story. So we have to go all the way back to 1862. President Lincoln signs the law that creates the US Department of Agriculture, and he calls it the people’s department. And, in the 1860s, 48% of Americans were farmers who needed good seeds and information to grow their crops. So it was really an important thing at that time. Fast forward to the 1930s, the Great Depression hits farmers extremely hard.

Falling prices for produce and livestock encouraged increased production which of course further led to lower prices. Between 1929 and 1932, the net average income of the farm operator fell 69%, according to the US Census. So, obviously at this time, without higher and stable prices, the farmers that were able to remain farming faced a pretty bleak future. Elected in late 1932, President Roosevelt made the Agricultural Adjustment Act one of the first legislative proposals under the New Deal. Two months after Roosevelt took office in May of 1933, Congress established the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, and that would oversee that program. Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace, if you know what he looks like– he’s right here– his vision of the ever-normal granary was propelled into action via the creation of this AAA. The goal of the AAA, of course, was to strike and maintain a balance between production and consumption of agricultural commodities. But because the government couldn’t order farmers to plant less, New Deal planners devised a voluntary acreage reduction program that had attractive incentives, local control, and surveillance procedures which included aerial photography that would verify compliance with the program. Over the next two-and-a-half years, the agency focused on controlling production through these voluntary contracts with growers who agreed to reduce acreage in exchange for benefit payments that they would receive to offset the lost income.

The payments were funded through a tax that was placed on the commodity processors. However, in 1936, the Supreme Court ruled that that tax was unconstitutional. So Congress quickly reacted, adopting a new conservation program instead, which utilized grants to pay farmers to switch from soil depleting to soil conserving crops. The Farm Act of 1938 included key changes and combined conservation with production and marketing controls. Grants funded by the federal government for soil conserving and soil building practices replaced the acreage reduction contracts, and farmers simply applied for whatever grants and payments they were eligible for. Wisconsin was a leader in soil conservation in the early 1930s and home to the very first soil erosion study by another newly created New Deal agency called the Soil Erosion Service. The Coon Creek Watershed soil erosion control demonstration in western Vernon County was the first in the nation. Hugely successful. It sparked additional erosion control demonstrations and practices across rural America.

Strip cropping was one common soil conservation practice. The conservation technicians who laid out strips became artists. They read the land and envisioned how contours flowed around the slope and into a landscape painting. At one time, 80% of the cropland in southwest Wisconsin was in contour strip cropping. Wisconsin’s first comprehensive USDA aerial flight took place in 1937 and lasted through 1941. This photography was initially utilized to monitor compliance with those soil conservation programs. Whether focused on conservation or production controls, New Deal farm policy, and the 1938 Farm Act in particular, depended on accurate measurements of field size at the farm level. In the 1860s, precise field measurements were made by carrying chains around the field, and then the maps were drawn by hand. But a more accurate, inexpensive, and efficient method was absolutely needed to be able to measure millions of acres of farmland across the United States.

In 1937, studies began on the effectiveness and accuracy of utilizing aerial photos as a proxy for measuring the actual field sizes. In the early 1940s, USDA established two aerial photo photography labs. One was in Asheville, North Carolina, and the other was in Salt Lake City, Utah. Field acreages were measured with a planimeter, a mechanical device used for measuring areas in the plain that allowed technicians to take measurements directly on the aerial photographs themselves. So just in summary, aerial photos were a huge part of New Deal farm policy, both for monitoring compliance, for grant-funded programs, as well as a tool for actually measuring and assessing the agricultural lands across the US. They also laid the foundation for the very first soil surveys created for the United States. They’re still used in this capacity today. So the USDA Farm Service Agency still flies aerial photos every year and uses it to help manage and work with farmers to help maintain and best manage their agricultural lands. So this is a really great photo.

This is a 1968 image in Lafayette County, but just gives you an example of what strip cropping looks like. It really looks like a piece of art to me. It’s just beautiful. Okay, so now you know the history and you know the utility of these amazing primary research resources, so let’s take a look at some views from above. And when I do these presentations, I talk about aerial photos a lot and I travel around and talk with people about aerial photos and I always try to come up with examples that are meaningful for wherever I’m presenting. So this one was great because it’s here, right? It’s right on campus. So this is a 1937 and a 2016 image essentially of campus. And one of the things you’ll notice that your eyes do when you look at imagery in this way is you instantly search for the things that are the same. You instantly look for, like, Bascom Hill for example.

Very clearly visible on both images. And then you can kind of orient yourself and then slowly start to envision where things look totally different. So the area on the west side of campus obviously looked pretty open. It looks like fields, essentially. And there’s a lot more going on there today, obviously. So if we zoom in to Henry Mall, which is, of course, where we are right now, we can highlight five different buildings in this area. And I had to reference my 1937 campus map that we have in the Map Library to, basically, accurately determine what the buildings were at that time from the photo. And there were two that sort of struck me. One is number four, the genetics Biotech Center, which is where we are, was a high school, which I didn’t know.

And maybe some of you knew that, but I thought that was pretty fascinating. And the other one was number five, the Medical Sciences Center, which was the Wisconsin General Hospital. And as we were walking over here from Science Hall, we noticed that on the front of the building you can still see where it says Wisconsin General Hospital. So I thought maybe everybody knows that it was a hospital because it says that. But one of the things that happens when I do research for aerial photo presentations like this is I find something that I didn’t know, and maybe it’s because I’m a librarian, I don’t know, but then I find myself down a rabbit hole researching everything I can about Wisconsin High School and the history of it and why was there a high school on the UW campus. It was kind of an interesting story. So I found all these newspaper clippings and there’s a whole website dedicated to the history of the school and the building. And one of the things I discovered was that it actually, so it was a high school until 1964. The last graduating class graduated from Wisconsin High School in 1964.

Any students that were currently enrolled there then split between Central High School or Madison West. And there was a, there were several newspaper articles that sort of highlighted, you know, the last commencement was the 53rd and final commencement. It was May 28th of ’64. And they interviewed the principal, and it kind of seemed like at this time of transition where, in 1964, the university had decided that it really needed to utilize that building for university academic programs. And the student enrollment at the high school was dropping. So there was, I’m sure, a combination of a lot of factors that went into the decision to, you know, make the transition from the high school to a campus building. But the principal of the high school had been there since 1948, and he didn’t seem super excited about the closure of the school and the transition that was happening. And I highlighted some of this newspaper article. I have to read it because it’s great.

So, it says, “The principal, since 1948, said last week that “persons from several departments of the university “were already in the school to measure desks “and look at equipment to see what they could get.” [laughter] “One group,” he said, “even made the request that we “leave the water bubbler and bulletin boards here as if we’d “planned to take them with us.” [laughter] “He also told about the concern of two alumni “for the high school’s athletic trophies. “The Wisconsin High School was the state basketball champion in “1923, and huge silver trophies attesting to that fact “graced the halls of the school. “A member of the championship team said it would be a “sacrilege for the trophies to grace the halls “of Central High School, our bitter rival. “Better to melt them up for scrap “or dump them in Lake Mendota.” [laughter] So, I thought, wow, some pretty serious athletic rivalries at that time. So, in the ’20s, which was kind of interesting. So these are the kinds of stories that just come up when you find things that you didn’t know about these places, and I really think it’s a testament to just geography in general and that sense of place and learning about our history. So, my second example, of course you know I’m from Milwaukee. I basically grew up in County Stadium. My parents were huge baseball fans.

And when I discovered that the site where County Stadium would be built in 1953 was peppered by these tiny little baseball fields, I thought it simply could not be a coincidence that baseball just was meant to exist in that location in our state. So, of course, County Stadium, built in 1953. This is a 1963 image of it. So, pretty drastic differences. Obviously the whole entire highway system was built in between that time. The Brewers played at County Stadium, of course, until 2000 when Miller Park opened in 2001. And you can see the differences in those two images as well. The imagery from 2015 is from the Milwaukee County Land Information Office. And this imagery has such high resolution that there is a small sort of like Little League field kind of in the middle of the parking lot.

Helfaer Field it’s called here. There’s a monument where the old County Stadium home plate was. There’s like a metal monument in the ground marking where the actual home plate from County Stadium was. And you can actually zoom in close enough to see that little thing in the pavement, which is kind of amazing. You can’t do that with the old photos. You just, you don’t have the same resolution. But it’s pretty amazing to see that difference. And then, last summer, we had a pretty interesting reference question from a person who was looking for evidence of an Air Force B-52 bomber crash in Sawyer County, Wisconsin. And it happened November 18th of 1966.

He sent me a sort of really crude Google map with a giant red circle that said, “It happened somewhere in here.” And I was like, oh, my gosh, there’s hundreds of photos. But we used maps and we– I did the whole research. I found a bunch of newspaper articles that sort of described in more detail where the crash happened. It was a very big deal. It was just outside of Stone Lake, which is kind of a rural area, obviously. And we ended up finding a USDA aerial photo from 1970, so four years later, that still clearly showed the scar in the forest where the plane crashed. And the reason that he wanted to find this was actually pretty amazing. He used to summer there was a kid. He’s from Illinois, but his parents had a cabin up there, his family had a cabin up there.

And it was always something they talked about and was really meaningful for him to be able to travel there to put a marker at the site of the crash to honor the nine airmen that died that night. And so we found the location, helped him with aerial photos find the location, and then last fall, so November of 2016, was the 50th anniversary of the crash. And so he traveled there and put the marker there in honor of those men. So that was a pretty great reference question and a pretty great result from that, being able to find it. And then this is my last example. We talk a lot about how we want to see change illustrated. We want to see how things have progressed or, you know, how different places look from one time to another. But sometimes it’s really comforting when you find things that have not changed at all. And this is a really great example of 70 years of cranberry marshes in Wood County.

Wood County, of course, number one cranberry-producing county in Wisconsin. 4,000 acres of cranberry marsh in that county. And there is basically no difference between these two images. And this, to me, the geometric landscape of what these look like from above is really beautiful. So I’m kind of grateful that nothing has changed in that area because it’s pretty beautiful. So I’m going to transition over to AJ to talk about the digital versions of some of these photos, but my hope is that you sort of understand why I think these photos are so amazing. And one of the reasons that we wanted to increase access to the collection is because they’re so personal to people. And you can, you know, do your own research and what’s important to you and places are important to you, but you can’t really do that, easily, if you have to come to the library and pull photos out of file cabinets. And so we were really interested in finding a way to broaden access and get at least the oldest photos in the collection out more broadly so that people can do this kind of research and look at these photos basically from their home.

And AJ is going to talk about making that transition from the print to the digital. So, thank you. [applause] – Thanks, Jaime. So, hello, everyone. I am AJ, and, as Tom mentioned, I work at the State Cartographer’s Office. Most people haven’t heard of the State Cartographer’s Office in Wisconsin. But it is a pretty amazing entity and one of only two states that have a state cartographer’s office. Arizona would be the other state. I know usually when I tell people, for example, from my home state of Indiana that I work at a state cartographer’s office, I get a variety of answers, including “Isn’t the mapping all done?” and “Do you still make them by hand?” [laughter] And, “No, it’s not all done,” and “No, we don’t make them by hand anymore.” But, our office does do a variety of interesting projects these days, many of which I don’t go into.

But as part of that, we have five permanent staff, and, more importantly, we have nine students who work up in a lab up above us. And besides putting together things like the third version of Wisconsin’s statewide parcel map in digital form and doing a variety of other kind of data creation and integration projects, one thing that we occasionally get to embark on, particularly in collaboration with the Map Library, is bringing historical map resources into the current digital world. And the students that I mentioned are a key component of that in that they do all of the technical programming and web programming in order to make that happen. And I work with them to develop those skills, and usually those skills go to helping them find a better job when they graduate. So when we’re thinking about the project, and we’ve had an opportunity to collaborate with the Map Library on a variety of projects over the years, but when we’re thinking about the project of bringing these 1930s and 1940s photos into the digital age, one of the things we always try to do is understand how do people naturally already find these photos? What is their natural intuitive way to come at it? And so I actually have visited with Jaime at various times at length to talk about the fact that in the beginning, when she got everything organized, really the only way to gain access to these photos was to either call Jaime on the telephone and describe the area you’re looking for or come to the Map Library, which is a public facility, and visit it in person, at which time you could either scan them yourself or you could take away a paper order form and then mail it in to have students scan and send you the photos. Later we would transition that paper order form into an online catalog of aerial photography and an online order form through the Map Library, of which we’ll take a quick peak at our online catalog, a long time one of our most popular applications on our website. And then, finally, we’ll get into the direct online download and what the students created over the last few years. So, to start with, this is our latest iteration of our Wisconsin Aerial Photography Catalog. I believe this is our third or fourth iteration since we’ve been on the Internet.

Though they did exist as paper catalogs before that time. It’s something that our office has been doing almost since the beginning when Arthur H Robinson and others helped in the creation of the office. The way the catalog works, as you might imagine a card catalog works, is you might search by either location or date. And then, upon searching, you’ll come up with a listing, as you’ll see down below, of various vintages of photography that exist by county for a given area. At the bottom, you’ll see we still maintain linkages to that digital online ordering form, as there are many more photos in the library than we were able to get into this one application. And the other thing you’ll notice is that for all of the collections that exist in the Map Library, we also have digital what you would call flight index sheets. And these flight index sheets come in a variety of different forms, but this one is important in that many times the flights were kind of manually plotted out and then the best index you had to go and locate a particular photo relative to a place on the ground was to use a grid like this. And you’ll see the flight line numbers running across the top of this index, and then little individual exposure numbers written by each dot. And those are actually how Jaime and her staff reference these photos within each collection is a flight line and an exposure number.

And these dots will become important later because they were a key way or they relate to a key technological way that we were able to accelerate getting all of these photos online for Wisconsin and a wider audience to enjoy. So the 1930s photos are also in the catalog, but we no longer maintain the indexes for those because you can directly go and search and freely download all of those photos, as is with this record for 1937 for Dane County. And that’s a result of our application that we call WHAIFinder, which is short for the Wisconsin Historic Aerial Image Finder. This was a– There are a few stats around. There are over 38,000 photos in the application. It is complete statewide coverage, though we are missing about a hundred photos, but, as I’ll show you in a little bit, most of the areas are still covered because many of these photos that have overlap that cover adjacent areas. They are all at a consistent scale. And we like to think it’s an easy to use web application. There are a variety of formats you can download as well.

If you’re in a rural area and have relatively low bandwidth, we have reduced resolution JPEGs. Otherwise you can get the original resolution scanned just as we store it. And there are no fees for subscriptions or anything like that to use it. This project, to create it, was a university-wide collaboration, plus the Department of Transportation. As we were assessing the collection in the Map Library, we realized there were a few areas that we didn’t have complete coverage, and it turns out that one of the district offices of the Department of Transportation had those photos that we needed. And so we were able to combine collections in order to create the comprehensive statewide collection. We also involved University of Wisconsin Digital Collections, which is part of Memorial Library. They actually handle super long-term preservation and storage of digital objects, including scanned photos. And so they handle all of the long-term sturdy storage of those, and we merely link to the copies of those.

This project was three years long, from about 2008 to 2011, and was completely enabled, it would not have been possible without the support of the Ira and Ineva Reilly Baldwin Wisconsin Idea Endowment, which does internal grants on campus for projects that have a particular use and impact for Wisconsin itself. And I think we’re all who were involved proud to say that in 2011 it did also receive the Governor’s Award for Archival Innovation from the Wisconsin Historical Records Advisory Board. So now in its second iteration, the first one that our students wrote actually lasted six years, which is a lifetime on the Internet, but we were glad it lasted that long because we were just able to get this one out this summer. This is our rewritten, completely written and coded by students, reconception then of how, like I said, replicating the way folks in the Map Library would work. They would usually start in the card catalog, and they’d find which file cabinet they needed to go to and which index map, and then they’d pull out a big index map that’s bigger than this lectern and search for their area of interest. Hopefully they could identify it, find that flight line and exposure number, and then go into the big folders and find their individual photos. So we link from the card catalog to here for just those oldest series of photos, and then attempt to give you, as circled in red, a few ways that you’re able to navigate quickly, hopefully, to your area of interest. Up in the left you can zoom to a particular county, or even enter a street address and zoom directly to that. And down in the right, in a nod to our students trying to make these applications more accessible on mobile devices, like tablets and phones, we have the “locate me” button, which you’ll see more and more often in mapping applications, to essentially zoom you to right wherever you are even if you don’t know where that is.

[laughter] At this point and at the risk of potential failure, but not, we’re going to actually do a live demonstration. So this is the application directly linked from both the Map Library and the State Cartographer’s Office website. And we thought we’d show you a few examples. Jaime showed you some examples in her slides. And here are examples that you yourself could go and do as well. So, first of all, we’ll test out that “locate me” button, which worked a short while ago. And we’ll see that it’s not too bad. And here we are on Henry Mall. And if we zoomed out just a little bit, it’s not quite perfect, what we’ll start to see are some white dots appear.

And what those white dots are, are those same dots that you saw in those index maps. And what’s unique about this collection and how we got them online is there were other universities about that same time, between 2005 and 2010, trying to get some of their oldest historical photos online because, amongst other things, they were actually becoming unstable. This is pretty old print paper at this point, right? 75 or 80 years. But many of them were actually trying to locate on the map where each individual photo was, and those projects were taking years and years, sometimes a decade for as many thousands of photos as we did. And so we didn’t actually geographically locate the individual photos, but we did have a really talented graduate student who wrote a program for us that used pattern recognition to go and scan those index maps and actually just take off the dots. And then we had students use some innovative ways to locate the dots strategically on the landscape. And then we loosely positioned the photo over those dots. That enabled us to finish the project in a much-accelerated fashion. And what you’ll find then is that you can then simply go and hover on a dot, and you can see the photo approximately placed where it’s supposed to be, but, in many cases, it, in fact, is pretty right on.

This would be an example of the photo where we are, right now. You’ll see that if you click on an area, for example the stadium right there, clicking on an area actually will highlight, in most cases, multiple dots, and that’s part of the nature of these collections of aerial photographs is that they’re not kind of end to end in a patchwork quilt but rather they have both end lap and overlap on the sides. And that was in part so that the folks who were looking at the photos from the farm service could actually use a manual pair of glasses with two different lenses and do stereo viewing of these photos to better be able to interpret the photos and see the crops that they were evaluating, but as a result of it, it also means that we have more than one photo that covers any given area. So if you have an area of interest that you’re searching for and this particular photo might happen to be blurry or had some cloud cover or something, then there’s usually also another one that you can take a look at that has many of the same areas covered. And so that gives our an opportunity to have, in some cases, multiple perspectives of a place. Beyond just hovering and looking at a photo, you can also then click on an individual photo record, and much like as if you were drilling down from the card catalog and flight index, you’re now taken to a place where you can directly download a small, medium, or large size, or go and zoom in and preview that photo at a much higher resolution, which we’ll show you in just a moment. Since we’re on the subject of football stadiums this time, instead of baseball, I figured we’d go ahead and go over to Brown County as well. And just to prove to our students that it works, if we were to type in 1265 Lombardi Avenue, you’d see that… …we’re taken to another familiar football stadium, the home of the Green Bay Packers.

And I’ll just bring it in a little closer here. And, of course, one interesting thing about being near Lambeau Field is that if you go back and look at the historical photos, you realize Green Bay didn’t even go that far yet. [laughter] And so we might consider the whole western portion of Green Bay to be Packerville for that part because certainly a lot of development happened around Lambeau Field and the existence of the Green Bay Packers in Green Bay. But it’s a pretty impressive view to see just in 75 or 80 years how Green Bay has changed over this time. And so we can zoom out and again see that we could go and look at that stadium on multiple photos, or the lack of stadium in this case. I thought that I’d just show you one more interesting example. While I’m sure that many of you have your own examples that you could think of and would like to go look at and some things are easier to identify from these scale of aerial photos and some are not. But as I was asking some friends who work in the field of mapping the other evening, what would you go look for on an 80-year-old aerial photograph here in the state of Wisconsin, kind of a big thing, an older friend of mine said, “I’d go “look for the ore pier, the iron ore pier out of Ashland,” because he said they just tore it down, the last height of it, in 2013. But, in fact, as we’ll see, there were more than one. And so, if we actually go and zoom to the city of Ashland…

And come in here a little closer. What you’ll see coming up and looking over here is that here, in fact, are three of those iron ore peers that went out into Lake Superior. And in looking up a little history about these piers, I determined that this southernmost one, just a little bit above our mouse here, was actually the Soo Line iron ore pier and was the last one that was around in Ashland. It was built around, between 1913 and 1916 when the iron ore industry was really booming. And it was built by a combination of the Minneapolis/St. Paul and Sault Ste Marie rail lines. And the way that these piers worked is that they would take the iron ore that was being mined in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and bring it on trains over to the Ashland piers. And then these trains would actually drive all the way out on these piers. And these piers, the last one before they took it down, it was 80 feet tall and 60 feet wide and extended 1800 feet into Lake Superior. At the time, in the 1960s when it was discontinued in use, it was considered to be the largest single concrete structure in the United States just by virtue of the amount of concrete in it.

But the way that these worked is that the train would actually drive all the way out onto the pier, and then they had emptying holes in the bottom of the train cars. And these piers, at 80 feet and 60 feet, had big holding containers right inside of the pier. And so the train cars would drop their ore out of the bottom into these holding tanks, and then the ships would drive up, you can see they’re long enough to have even more than one ship docked at a time, would come and there were chutes that would come out of the side of the pier and fill up the iron ore ships. As I was telling Jaime this story from doing the research around it, we were looking at these photos and I wondered to myself, I’m not going to be able to point with the mouse, but if you look directly north of the mouse, there’s a little blip on this photo, and we kind of wondered, I wonder if that’s a ship actually leaving the pier. And so, beyond our own application which you can view these photos and download them, we do also link back to the UW Digital Collections viewer, which, while it does not show you on a map, it does allow you to do a few more things that ours doesn’t quite, including zoom in on the non-transparent version of the photo. And I think you’ll see that if we zoom in really tightly, and if we can find it, that we could convince ourselves that, in fact, that is a ship leaving the pier. And so just the sheer resolution in a digital form based on what you can discover. This is better than my glasses with another set of glasses could do on that original photo. And so, but it’s really quite amazing.

And if, again, you didn’t want to download a whole photo but you just had a little piece that you really wanted to capture, you can use this alternate way to download, and you could just go and right click and save the image, just a little clip-out from one of these photos. And so there are multiple ways to get out and download as well as hopefully explore and truly enjoy this whole collection. And I know that we’ve really enjoyed both doing the research and coming here to talk to you about it. And with that, that’s the end of our presentation and demonstration, and we hope you’ll go look at all kinds of photos tonight. [laughter] [applause]