A aerial photographic history of my house (and other family places)
From the Connecticut State Library
1934 Aerial Imagery
The original photo, without lettering, is here, and the original
A -- This is where the stone house will be.
I can't tell if the dark area next to it is legitimately a pond; I suspect it's either just an area that's flooded with the spring rains or it's a swampy area that has greened up earlier the drier soils. You see a number of these dark areas in low lying spots on the photo.
1951 Aerial Imagery
The original photo, without lettering, is here.
A -- Petersen's Motel
B -- Finn Hall
C -- Interesting -- no fish pond! I had always thought that was built at the same time as the others
D -- Swim Pond
1965 (without letters here.)
A -- Fish Pond is now in built. Appears to be late winter, with ice still on the pond but melting (the dark edge around the pond)
B -- Trucking garage with trailers in the yard.
C -- Sauna, Old Screenhouse, and my house all in place
D -- The Frog Pond is clearly visible, I can't tell if it was in the 1951 photos
E -- Still fairly open on top of the hill (where in 2008/09/10 most of my firewood cutting has been)
F -- Still very scrubby in this area as the woods reclaim pasture.
1970 (without letters here.; Original photo here
A -- Trucking garage is gone; this is a year or two earlier then I thought it burned down.
Kivela Farm, Anderson Road, Brooklyn:
1934 (The house and coop was built by contract for Arvid & Impi before they moved from Manhattan to Brooklyn; after the '38 Hurricane they would move to Plainfield):
Here's a wider view of the area:
A -- Kivela Farm. I don't know why the field next to it is so dark -- there's a few other scattered fields like that in the photo; I'm guessing it was plowed in the fall perhaps?
B, C, D -- other chicken farms. B & C especially look like our family farm, tucked away at the marginal edges of what was once a larger farm.
E -- Anderson's place; this is a slightly older place and you can see the two smaller coops. You can also see a small coop across the road at what is today's Arter's place.
Kivela Farm, Plainfield:
1951 (without letters here.)
A -- House
B -- Barn
C -- Chicken Coop...I didn't know they had Chickens in Plainfield! I remembered my dad & family talking about vegetables, so I always thought it was just that.
D -- Pasture.
And in general, because of how much the texture and patterns of whether plowing is north-south or east-west you can tell this farm is growing a diversity of crops but in relatively small areas. That's a hallmark of vegetable farms on these photos.
1965 (without letters here.)
14 years later and big changes.
A -- The beginnings of Kivela Road, though it still looks like it's dirt with a strip of grass in the middle. The entrance has cemetery road has moved from left of the family house to the right.
B -- Half the coop is gone
C -- Uncle Ed's house is built, no garage yet.
D -- Notice how the variations of the vegetable fields have been replaced by the uniform texture of one large corn field.
E -- A home under construction?
2010:
