Before you ask — no, unfortunately we have not managed to invent a time machine. The Doctor has not arrived in the TARDIS, Doc Brown has not built a flux capacitor into one of our utility vehicles, and Bill and Ted are… probably at the mall with the princesses.
But we are in for an excellent adventure.
Xplorers, today, we’re introducing you to one of our favorite tools — a kind of real-life time machine. It’s a tool we use all the time in our work, and it’s a tool you can access right now! (Well, hopefully after you finish reading this post!)
It’s called HistoricAerials.com, and it’s brought to you by National Environmental Title Research, LLC (NETR). The good people at NETR have assembled the largest collection of atlases, topographic maps, and — my personal favorite — aerial photographs of the United States ever — according to their website, their collection is reaching a petabyte. For those of you math-challenged like me, that’s 1,000 terabytes, 1 million gigabytes, or 125,000x the memory of my hard drive. This is an enormous amount of data, and you can use it to learn more about any place in the country!
In this post, we’ll give you a brief tutorial on how to use NETR’s online database and share a fascinating example of the kind of history you might uncover. It’s going to be a blast!
Ready to time travel?
Vintage Aerial Photography — A Window Into the Past
Here’s the real magic of HistoricAerials.com: Not only can you pull up maps and images of any place in the United States, but you can also stack them on top of each other to look through them and directly compare and contrast through time. Want to learn how? Good, because it’s tutorial time!
Head over to HistoricAerials.com and click the yellow “View Images” button. In the search bar at the top of the map window on the next page, search for whatever location you want — the Grand Canyon, New York City, your own house, whatever! That will automatically pull up the atlas map of the location, which is a pretty standard map like you’re used to seeing on Google Maps or Waze.
But notice on the left side of the map, there’s a bar with several buttons. For today, we’re going to focus on the two in the middle. One says “Aerials” — that one is pretty self explanatory. Click on it to see the most recent aerial photograph of your search location. You’ll also notice that a second button menu pops up next to the first; this one shows you every year from which NETR has an aerial photo of that location.
It’s fun to click through the different photos, but the good people at NETR have made it even easier to compare images at different points in time — that’s where that second button comes into play. It says “Compare,” and when you click on it, four buttons pop up. For today, you want the one with the flashlight. This is the “Spotlight” feature, and it’s incredible!
When you select the spotlight button, a second menu appears on the right side of the window; now, you can choose a second aerial photograph. Then, when you move your mouse over the image, a round “spotlight” will appear showing the image underneath your cursor. Now, you can scroll around through the image and see how very precise locations have changed throughout time! It’s your own little window into the past.
Aerial Photography in CRM
You can probably imagine the possibilities when it comes to using this incredible technology in the CRM world. Before we ever send people out to dig anything, we take a look at all the aerials and topographic maps available for the area to get a sense of what to expect in the field.
Because of the relative recency of photography (Can you believe it’s only been around for about 175 years?), this process doesn’t tell us much about pre-Contact or early historic-era sites, but it can tell us plenty about more recent historic resources. We check for buildings, roads, cemeteries, bridges and other human-built features to see what resources we need to investigate in the field. We’ll look at those resources through time to see how they’ve changed — When was that bridge built? Has that cemetery been well-maintained? Is that house still standing, or has it been abandoned and left to collapse? These are the kinds of questions we answer with NETR’s images, and by piecing together the puzzle of how historic resources have changed through time, we gain a clearer picture of the history of the area.
Let’s look at an example, courtesy of TerraX Public Sector Proposals Princess and Friend of the Blog, Sharlene O’Donnell, who sent me the coolest newsletter from NETR all about America’s flooded cities.
Head over to HistoricAerials.com and type in “Long Hunter State Park.” That will pull up a map of part of Tennessee just east of Nashville. Notice J. Percy Priest Lake. Follow the instructions from our tutorial to see the 2021 aerial on top and the 1951 aerial on the bottom, and use the flashlight to take a look. Notice the difference? Yup, back in ‘51, J. Percy Priest Lake wasn’t a lake at all!
As you zoom in and scroll around, you can see roads, fields, buildings, and other features all over the area covered by the lake in the 2021 image. There were forests, farmlands, and even small communities there just 70 years ago! You can still see it on the 1957 and 1958 aerials, but click on the 1980 image, and you’ll see the lake appear for the first time. So what happened? This is where we would pull out our super smart sleuthing skills (read: research skills, ha!) and get to searching.
According to CityDays.com, in 1967, the United States Army Corps of Engineers completed production of the J. Percy Priest Dam in 1967. They built the Dam and created J. Percy Priest Lake to mitigate the risk of flooding along the Stones River and to provide a water supply for the Nashville area. J. Percy Priest Lake continues to serve those important functions today, but as historians and archaeologists, we’re fascinated to know what we might learn from a study of those aerials from before 1967.
By studying these aerials, we can gain insight into the lifeways of people who lived in the area during the mid-century. What were their lives like? The area is pretty rural, and much of the land appears to be farmland — what did they grow? How did the people sustain themselves? What did rural Tennessee life look like for people in the mid-twentieth century? These are the kinds of questions we would try to answer. And who knows? Maybe one day some underwater archaeologists will get to dive to the bottom and recover any data that may be left at the bottom of the lake!
Okay, But Can I Check Out the Aerial View of My Home?
Why yes, you can!
Now that you know how to use NETR’s time machine, you can use it to visit anywhere in the country any time you like! Type in your hometown, and see what aerials are available — how has your area changed throughout the years? Was your neighborhood once rolling farmlands or a swampy marsh? What buildings have come and gone? Who may have lived there before you?
By looking back at these old aerial photos, we can learn so much about our collective past. We can trace patterns of development, understand how people’s lives changed over time, and give ourselves a clearer picture of the history of a given space. In that way, we can cruise through the decades visiting places at different points in time. We’re just like time travelers — no flux capacitor necessary.
Thanks for joining us on this most excellent adventure, Xplorers! We hope you had a fun trip! Until next time, play around on HistoricAerials.com, and share what you find! Check us out on Facebook (TerraXplorations, Inc.) and Instagram (@terraxplorations). We’d love to hear what you learn on your time travels!
See you later, Xplorers!
KB
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