Saturday, November 6, 2010

Aerial Farm View

Found a scanned copy of an aerial view of the farm where I grew up. That is where I milked cows, drove tractor, harvested the crops, and performed some other smelly tasks that are also part of dairy farming. I also sneezed and wheezed with the asthma and hay fever. And survived the whole ordeal. Good place to learn how to work. And the instructions only came once. There was always something to do around a farm.

There were probably aerial photographs of farms as soon as there were planes. The earliest that I remember was a black and white view taken about 1949. It has disappeared with lots of other stuff that Dad did not deem worth keeping. Fortunately, this 1961 aerial photo survived.


With a little Photoshop effort, the arial photo of the farm was modified to be a reasonable representation of the farm buildings in 1950 plus or minus a year.


The photo reminds me of my most frequent childhood fantasy of playing the cowboy. A dairy farm looks nothing like a mythological western cattle ranch as depicted in movie westerns with mountains and wide open spaces. It does take a bit of imagination to create that western cowboy scene including the western town and saloon. In my early teen years with more farming responsibilities, the fantasy play stopped.

Fortunately, Dad had always loved horses. With enough begging, eventually Dad bought a horse when I was fourteen.

Earlier this year in my previous blog space, the entry Shattered Myth details how fantasy sets some unrealistic expectations.


While creating this entry, I checked the satellite photos of the farm at Google Mapping. The house and barn are about the only things that remain after 50 years. Today, newer structures dwarf the house (built 1911) and barn (foundation built 1916). Checked the terrestrial (courtesy of Google) view from highway 96 about a quarter of a mile away. Trees hide much of the house and there is a cell tower less than a hundred yards from the barn.

The cell tower reminds me of the wall mounted "crank" phone that was at that house when I moved to San Francisco in 1965. Hmm. That looks like a story for another post.

1 comment:

  1. Beautiful farm. I've always wanted to live on a farm. I've had chickens, but that's about it. I plan to have more egg layers some day.

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