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).
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).