Here is an article that is not about any of the “normal” topics of this newsletter: genealogy, history, current affairs, DNA, and related topics. However, I am publishing it because I am interested in the topic (I was born and raised in Maine in a small town on the edge of the “Northern Forest Region.” I suspect others may be interested in this subject also.)
Tucked away in a quiet, climate-controlled building on the University of Maine campus is a collection of old film. Donated to Fogler Library’s Special Collections by the James W. Sewall Company (Sewall) in 2019, the collection includes over 3,000 large canisters, each with a bright yellow “Kodak” sticker on the front and 250 photos contained within.
Taken from airplanes between 1946 and 2015 for land surveying purposes, much of the photo collection tells a story of the forest spanning the northeastern United States — Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont and beyond. They have sat mostly unused since their donation, waiting for a student with the right academic background to come along and figure out how to use them — and for what purpose.
Peter Howe, a Ph.D. student in the School of Forest Resources at UMaine, will be working with the photographs to create the Northern Forest Historical Atlas. The project, which Howe is working on in collaboration with Paul Smitherman, a library specialist in Special Collections, will result in the digitization of tens of thousands of photos into mosaics made with photogrammetry software.
Howe, who has an undergraduate degree in geography from Middlebury College in Vermont, was raised in central New Hampshire and spent his formative years studying, working and adventuring around the woods of New England. There he nurtured a passion for mapping and ecology that led him to work with historical photographs as a window into the past. He graduated from Middlebury in 2018 and worked as a freelance GIS consultant and cartographer before starting the Ph.D. program at UMaine in fall 2023.
During his time at Middlebury, Howe produced novel maps of historical tree line shift in the White Mountains of New Hampshire dating back to 1943.
“I had gotten into this kind of niche area of mapping and working with historical photographs, using them as a record of the historical landscape and to understand change across time,” he said.
You can read a lot more in an article published in the University of Maine’s web site at: https://bit.ly/3yBEvzy.