Several years ago Pat Veraguth, the Winona County Surveyor, acquired copies of old aerial photographs covering Winona County.  These have become increasingly valuable in our work and recently we started looking for photographs covering other Counties where we frequently work.

With the help of Bruce Shepperd from the Minnesota DNR, I finally figured out that the Winona County photographs originated at the John R. Borcher Map Library at the University of Minnesota.  The Library has an extensive collection of photographs that are slowly being scanned, georeferenced and added to the Library’s GIS.  They are also being added to the Minnesota DNR Landview GIS.

Unfortunately neither GIS currently covers southeast Minnesota so I emailed the Library and asked how I could obtain copies of other photographs.  They replied that many photographs had already been scanned but had not been processed for use in the GIS.  They said these photographs could be found here.  (Indexes can be found in this folder.)

Most of the photographs are from the ASCS and were taken in the mid-1930’s and early 1940’s.  Most appear to be high quality scans (typically 600 dpi, 8-bit grayscale images) and are available as either tiff files (better quality) or jpeg files (smaller size).

​Over the past month we have been working on a survey near Hokah, Minnesota. In order to determine the boundary of our client’s parcel, we first had to establish the location of six Government Corners.  One of those Corners was the SW Corner of Section 1, T103N, R5W.

At the SW Corner of Section 1, T103N, R5W we found two iron monuments (a 1 1/4 inch iron pipe and a 1 inch axle shaft) and decided to further excavate the site to determine whether there might be any additional monuments. We found the stone monument pictured below

For clarity, the stone was pulled forward. The red and white chaining pin marks where the stone was found. Although not clearly visible, the 1 inch axle shaft is located behind the stone just to the right of a small blue and white brush. The 1 1/4 inch iron pipe was located a little over 2 feet behind the axle shaft.

Our research indicates that the 1 1/4 inch iron pipe was set by another surveyor as part of a survey he did in 1979. The iron shaft was probably set in 1936 by former County Surveyor E. B. Webster (his survey is here) who likely found the stone next to what at the time would have been a corner post to fences running north, south, east and west as shown below.