A friend forwarded me this email and I thought I would share it with the MissPresiverse. VintageAerial.com (tagline: “Discover Rural America’s Heritage”) has recently published a portion of the Mississippi aerial photos in their collection. Coverage is spotty and it dates to the 1980s, not the 1950s as I had hoped when I first saw it, but they say they have 2 million photos in their collection, so hopefully it will fill in over time. Unlike other aerial photo collection taken for governmental purposes, these were aerial photos taken for commercial purposes, primarily of farms and rural areas, to sell to the owners, and perhaps as postcards.
Although you can search by address, the easiest way I’ve found to search is through the map interface, which shows you which counties have photos and which don’t, and then you can scroll in to see if there’s coverage of a particular property in that county.
You can create an account for free and if you are lucky enough to be able to identify some of the pictures, you can gather points toward buying a print. Some users have thousands of tags, so we have some catching up to do! I just joined, and so far I haven’t found a building I can identify, but I must admit I spent most of an evening just scrolling through roll after roll of aerials finding trailer parks and gas stations and lots of farmhouses in the middle of cotton fields–ADDICTION WARNING!!
|
Categories: Recent Past, Roadside, Urban/Rural Issues, Vernacular Architecture
Preservation in Mississippi 
Uh-oh…I see a new time-burner coming up. While going through family stuff at Mom’s last summer, we found an aerial of our house taken in the 70s. We could date it fairly close by the number of barns since Dad built a barn a year for about 6 years.
LikeLike
I found my daddy’s house near Learned. Wow. Brings back memories.
LikeLike
wow! thanks for this info. can’t wait to have some ‘time to burn’ amidst all the photos!
LikeLike
Well, there went my day!!
LikeLiked by 2 people
You’re welcome!
LikeLiked by 1 person
am always leary of ‘joining’ such online stuff, but, eventually, probably will. no forrest county nor adams county yet. limited claiborne county, and, in a look just now, nothing on ‘windsor ruins’, it seems. are these only rural views?
LikeLike
I have seen only rural for Clay County. Quite a few house trailers too. From my examination it appears that they were flying about snapping every domicile no matter how humble, while overlooking many of the landmarks buildings, e.g. I never saw Waverley mansion.
LikeLike
I’ve looked in vain for several rural landmarks, including Waverley. Isn’t that strange? I guess it’s possible that the images exist but just haven’t been digitized yet. I also looked for Ceres plantation in Warren County, which would seem to fit the bill as a working farm in that era, but no luck.
LikeLike
The whole operation has a random quality about it.
LikeLike