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One Man's Trash...

Dr. Robert Miles indeed retrieved these very large volumes from the trash outside of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers office in Louisville, KY some time in the late 1980s. He then donated the volumes to the EAS Library where they have been (an uncataloged) part of the collection for many years.

Historic Impact

On a tip from Dr. Miles, EAS Librarian Carolyn Laffoon (see the Who's Responsible page) dug out an article attributed to Claude H. Birdseye, born of an address to the Association of American Geographers in Chicago, Illinois, 1939. In it, Birdseye suggests that "the first commercial use of aerial photographs in making topographic maps in the United States seems to have been by a firm in Philadelphia that later became known as Brock & Weymouth." We believe Birdseye was describing this Mosaic..., and he goes on to mention the Wabash and White rivers by name.

C. H. Birdseye. Stereoscopic phototopographic mapping. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 30(1):1–24, mar 1940.

Subset v. Full Collection

This site is currently featuring only a subset of the entire original collection. Twenty-five orthophotos of the Wabash River, from Logansport to Terre Haute,

appear on this site. All of these come from Volume 1. An even smaller subset of the directly-related topo map series were included, as the scanning/rectification has only been performed on eight of those maps. Purdue's EAS Library intends to develop more of this series, including the White River photos and topos, into usable source data for the map over the summer/fall of 2007.