Day 158 - Historic Aerials of our Property

Before I begin the history lesson on my property, I want to give a shout out to historic aerials.com. This website is awesome. I have spent so much time going down the rabbit hole that is old aerial photographs. I'm a map person. I love maps. Absolutely love maps. Love making them. I love looking at older maps. It's so much fun to see the change. For example, this is New Albany, Mississippi, little town of New Albany, Mississippi. This is Walmart right here. This this image, by the way, is from 2021. This is Walmart. This is Lowe's. You have the major four lane highway coming through here. This is Interstate 22. Although it recently became an interstate. I don't know, maybe 5-10 years ago. Before then, it was Highway 78. It was a Mississippi Highway 78 that connected Memphis to essentially Tupelo and Alabama. Now it is Interstate 22. This diagonal right here is Highway 30, which connects New Albany, west to Oxford, Mississippi. Highway 30 dead ends right here into what is now 178, or commonly referred to as Old 78. Inside the city limits, this is Bankhead Street. There is a railroad track paralleling Bankhead Street. And down here is downtown. As soon as you cross the Little Tallahatchie River, it goes into downtown New Albany. And of course, all of the residential development that happened right after the town was created, I guess, or vice versa. I don't know the whole history of New Albany, but you can kind of get an indication of how things develop by looking at old cities and seeing like, you know, what resources did they have? They had access to a railroad track, they had access to a river. How big was the river? Could you put ferries down? That kind of a thing. So you can see how cities develop and grow based upon what's around them and the resources whatnot. But I think one of the things that's really interesting stuff like this is to see modern day and then flip back in a time to let's just say 1955. Immediately, this highway is gone, poof, gone completely. And Old 78 still there, railroad track is still there, Highway 30 coming through all this cropland, still there. And then you take Highway, I'm sorry, Old 78, 78, whatever it was called back then, cross the river. And now you're in Old Downtown. And all of the residential development that's associated with it. Super fascinating stuff. Anyway, let's jump into Photoshop, where I will show you the land. Here in Photoshop, I've got like 15 or 20 layers to jump through this is this is so much fun. I love this. This is essentially the boundary of our property minus this little house right there. We don't have that. But this is essentially the boundary of our property. And if we look at this image from 2023, you can kind of kind of see the original four wheeler trail that ran through the property. And here's the fork in the road, the original trail went north. This is what I'm calling presently, mattress trail. Some of you on Instagram will understand why that's mattress trail. And then the trail forks off this way. And I don't know the exact layout with it too much. It goes over to here. Not on this map. Anyway, I've got it all detailed on another map, but goes all the way over to here. And that was the only original trail that went to the property. This main trail starting going all the way through. And then there's a fork right here. That's the only thing that's original. We've done so much. And we've got a perimeter trail that goes all the way around it. Now we've got a lot of internal trails, a lot of access trails. Somebody asked me why all the trails on the property? Well, you see all these natural resources right here. I want to be able to access them when the time comes. I'm not gonna be clear cutting anything. But if a tree is showing signs of decay or, or insect damage, I'm going to pull it out. And I want to have good access to the majority of the property. And of course, recreational trails as well. So anyway, this is from 2023. And you can kind of sort of kind of sort of see that the north half is primarily pines. And the south half is primarily hardwoods. And you can kind of get an idea that from the topograph or from the from the aerial view of the top of the trees, the canopy, they look differently, this is a lot more common and symmetrical and things just look about the same size, this is a lot more randomized. So this tells me this was commercially planted, which is very, very common around here, row planted pines. And this is some type of natural regrowth. This is not planted at all. So let's jump through time. Oh, real quick. One of the most interesting maps that I've been able to find is an infrared map. This one didn't come from historic aerials.com. It came from land ID, if I'm not mistaken. And from here, you can see the heat signature and have a clear distinction on the type of trees. So all these darker trees, these are pines. All the lighter ones are hardwoods. We have some pines coming off on this side over here, a lot of the pines that were purposefully planted over here. And then this is kind of like a mix. This doesn't seem to have any type of no signs of purposefully planting, it just kind of blends, which makes sense, because as you get further away from these planted pines, it starts to get thinner and thinner and thinner, as far as the pine density, and all this is hardwoods. Now, this is also interesting, because we can start to see I think, I'm thinking this is kudzu. If you guys are familiar with kudzu, you'll know how annoying it is. But I believe this is kudzu. And if I'm not mistaken, there is a drainage ditch that kind of separates us and slow down the expansion of kudzu. That's a that's a topic for another day. But anyway, there's so much information to be gained from these maps. So you can clearly see lines in between these trees, right? This one in particular, right there, you can see these lines. And what I used is this particular map to help me develop the trail system in here, because you think about this, and you're like, well, there's clearly something right here, what is right here? Well, if you come in from this way, from this direction, this is an old logging trail that has ditches on either side. So I think this was here for a while, we actually have this as a modern day trail right here, that little section right there is a modern day trail, but I use this particular map to see where it makes the most sense for the trails. I do believe this is from 2014. And I don't think this is anything newer than that. So about a decade old, but you can still get an idea of where stuff is on the property from this. So let's jump forward in time to 2023. This is the summer of 2023. Pretty good detail. 2021 doesn't have that good of detail. No big deal. We can't really tell anything specific about the property from this map. This one is 2020. Not that much detail. 2018 What do we see on this map? Well, this one was taken at least sometime in the fall. Because we see all these different colors. This is the first first time seeing this and just sparked my mind of like, oh, yeah, fall, we haven't experienced fall on the property yet. All these hardwoods down here, they're going to be I hope I would expect all kinds of different colors being shown right here. We have, by the way, we have a lot of red maple scattered throughout here red maple, I've seen two different types of hickory trees, oak trees. Basically, we are going to see some colors this fall. I'm super excited about that. And seeing this particular map from 2018 reminded me of that our house pad location or shop pad location is somewhere right around here. And we pushed it off into the pines. So that way, we didn't have to take down any hardwoods, but also so we could see the hardwoods as well. We wanted to be right next to them. That's one of the many, many reasons why we chose right there for our shop pad and house pad and whatnot. So this is 2018 2016, you can start to see that this is a little bit lower, which does make sense because this natural regrowth of hardwoods over here isn't barely anything in here is large diameter, except on the creek bank. These trees are old monster trees, huge, huge trees on this creek bank. But this natural regrowth, I call this the jungle because it's got a lot of soft softball diameter, softball size diameter, or smaller trees, and it's densely packed through here. So I'm calling it the jungle. But anyway, what can we see from this photograph this view? Well, we saw the clear distinction of the trails, we have this whatever this is. And we also have this, which was something that we found a drainage drainage ditch of some kind that had a natural trail right next to it. So we do have a modern day trail right there. That's pretty cool. This one is 2014. Now this is why I think that the the infrared view is from 2014 mainly because of the size of this tree and then this, this little clearing right here, right. So that particular clearing this particular tree, let's focus or I'm sorry, let's toggle the infrared on and off. You'll see that this tree is about the same size. And there's a little bit of a movement in the in the stacking of these layers. But that's okay. You can see this clearing this little open area, and then this tree right here. About the same size. And let's just say I jumped to that tree is way bigger in 2020. So yeah, this one does line up the best with 2014. So as far as I'm concerned, 2014, infrared data. Alright, back to 2014. Let's go back to 2012. And here, you start to see evidence of when they thinned these trees. It's still low resolution, but you can clearly see these lines through here of of thinning. So that's 2012 2010. Maybe it looks like this is a little bit more dense, which makes sense if they thinned in 2012 ish. Okay, 2009. You can clearly see that this area over here, the jungle as I call it, that's much lower. I think so. Anyway, it doesn't look as tall, you know, you see the shadow line right here on this drainage ditch, where the trees are casting a shadow, it tells me that these trees are much taller than this stuff right here. Lots to learn from these photos. 2009, we still have these actually these lines through here. So I don't know exactly when they thinned 2007. Pretty much more of the same. The majority of these images, by the way, cover up the cover up the pond, I turned my Yeah, I crosshairs back on right under this is where the pond is. So when I get to the end, I did something different. So I could see what see how the pond was 2007. All right, here's 2014. Not the best image. 2000 I'm sorry, all the way back to 1996. Alright, so there's something to be gained here something to learn here from 1996 to 2004. Focus on this area over here. This is still in 1996. cropland. And this honestly looks like cropland as well. But clearly, the pines were planted before 1996. Okay, cool, cool. Let's go back 1992. I'm going to bounce around between 1992 1996. Here's 9692 9692 9692. So here in 1992. I can't say for sure for certain that the pines are not here. I can't say for certain because when you plant pines, it takes them a couple years for them to grow up to where you can probably see them on an on a topograph or aerial map aerial photograph, right? If these are two feet tall, they're not showing up on this photograph for sure. So I don't know if it was planted exactly in 1992 or what. But 1992 is the first image going back in time where it's clear that the pines are not huge yet. 1985 Wow. 1980 8592 8592 85 the majority of the land where the pines are is all farmland farmland. This is old farmland. You still see the trees by this drainage ditch. This drainage ditch was in there for a long time. I've noticed right here. It's interesting to see things because you find this image where the trail comes through here and trail forks that way. But I haven't uncovered it yet. But there's a clear logging trail that goes something like this and connects this little connection right here is one of my last pieces of the puzzle for the trail system because I've already found this drainage ditch right here has a trail on either side of it. Now when we come down this way, I do have a modern day trail here, but it doesn't connect to here. Because all of this is still intact. You have to come out this way to come back down, come back over this way. So this was established way way back in the day, this is 1985. A year before I was born, I was born in 1986. So all of this is interesting farmland property used to be a farm. Let's go back in time even further. This is 85. This is 1980. Is there much of a difference there? 8085 8085 I guess it's just a better image from 1980. So you can kind of see and kind of see the trees starting to grow. Right. So I don't I don't know what all this if this is underbrush or if this is forest by then. I don't really know. But for sure. You can see things starting to grow there like they let in. I have that backwards. It looks like from 1980. This doesn't look like it's farmland in 85. They took that into farmland. Interesting. Okay, so they added more farmland. I thought it was a subtractive process where they gradually got rid of the farmland as time went on. See, we're learning here. All right, back to 1980. Let's go from 1980 to 1975. A couple trees here and there in the pasture in 1975. The trees up through here. Clearly, there's some trees there. But it's hard to say if they're like the big monster trees that are over here by the creek. Now what's interesting over here is, is you can't really clearly identify where the creek is. So did the creek really start to erode away and become a bigger creek from 1975 when this photo was taken? I don't know. Interesting. Let's go back in time to the original. So from 1975, the oldest photo I could find is 1955. Now something I did on 1955, because this is ultimately the information that I want. This is the oldest indication of the property. I zoomed in on historic aerials.com. And then I took a screenshot of like, over here. And then I took one in the middle, you know, like one over here, and then one in the middle, and then one over here, and I pieced them together. And what I got was a little bit higher resolution of 1955. So here we go. This is the oldest photograph I could find of the property. Here is the pond. Let me turn these back on. You can see the crosshairs right there right through the pond. This is the original pond. Now this tells me, if they cut this pond, this was purposefully built, this was not original at all. There's no indication on the topography of the land that says this is a naturally occurring pond, it looks like it was purposefully shaped. Presently, as well as in this photograph. So this tells me it's probably like a cattle pond, right? They probably had cattle out here. And that was their water source. You have what looks to be row row crops over here, row crops this direction. This is all farmland. So if I bounce between the oldest and the newest, you'll see that only this down here, I'm just going to highlight right about there. So this is the original trees on the property, this boundary box. Now if I jump over to present day, this was the original trees. As a matter of fact, the trees over here on the property line, those look like they belonged. Yeah, they were farmland to the pasture that's over there currently. So that's interesting. Um, yeah, this is this is just fascinating for me this this creek system over here, this drainage system for these, these fields, these farm fields, that's still intact. That is still there. And as a matter of fact, I just remember there is a barbed wire fence running through here, which looks like there should be a barbed wire fence going like so maybe maybe not all of this. But this clearly looks like a barbed wire fence. Maybe maybe this section over here was cattle. And this over here is you know, monocrop agriculture. Interesting. This actually looks like a fence line as well. Who knows, right? Who knows. But this is fascinating to me. So let's, let's take the boundary box away for the trees. And let's bounce back and forth between the oldest and present day, summer of 2023. So last year. Now I wouldn't say present day, that's actually false. Because once this updates, and I can see our clearing and all of our trails, oh, it's going to be so much fun to compare them. Infrared 2014. present day 2023 1955. When I get my shop up and running, I'm going to get a poster size printout or canvas of something that is the current the current day map, not trees or nothing will just be like the actual map like you see if you go to like Google Maps, I've got one that I've created for the property. And I'm going to set it side by side in the in the shop next to a full size version of this, how it was versus how it's going. This type of stuff is fascinating to me. Hopefully you found this interesting as well go to this or excuse me historic aerials.com. If you want to tinker around in your own area, it is a lot of fun. I think so anyway, you guys take care, have a great day. And I will talk to you in the next video.