The Photograph

Magnify Photo

I was browsing the Internet a while ago and found myself looking into a Prince Edward Island government website that contains many archive aerial reconnaissance photographs from the 1930’s up to the present day. On further examination I found that one of the photos taken included the 300 acres which is the farm that my uncle still lives on. This farm has in been run by my relations for over two hundred years. The photograph that I had found included a minimum capability for magnification which allowed me to zoom in on the farm itself. Having spent most of the summers there since I was a child, I was able to recognize the river that winds its way past one border of the farm  while the backend is densely forested with both hard and softwood trees. I could identify the old farmhouse itself which was surrounded by many buildings some of which I recognized immediately and others which were there when this photograph was taken but had fallen or were taken down many years before I was born. Clearly visible between the farm house and the road that divides the property was the apple orchard which seemed to be in full growth and I assumed that the picture had been taken in mid to late summer as each tree formed a dark black shadow on the ground. The amazing thing about this photo was I was looking back in time at the farm as it was in 1935 when my mother was still living there and her father was still alive. I could see all of the buildings that used to form a circle around the farmyard. Each one of the buildings had a name and had a specific role in the operation of the farm. The main huge barn was where the livestock had been housed, cattle for milking and eventual sale to acquire the funds to buy basic supplies which couldn’t be grown, the four Percheron draft horses which were the literal “horsepower” that pulled all of the machines that were used in the cultivation and harvesting of the cash crops such as potatoes and strawberries. There was the piggery building in which the 20-30 pigs were kept. Beside that was the chicken coop in which my grandmother would visit each morning to collect the fresh eggs for the morning breakfast. I could also see the icehouse which was a building dedicated to the storage of ice packed in sawdust to stop the thawing process. The machine house to the right of the icehouse was for the storage of the old horse drawn plow, thrashing machine, hay rake, hay mower and all the other equipment that was used on a farm.

After further examination of the photograph, I was interested enough to do some further research and was able to get some assistance in this by enlisting the help of a government employee in the National Air Photo Library in Ottawa. She used the equipment she had at her disposal to tell me that she could see a person standing in the front yard of the farm house and she was able to use the magnification to tell me that the person was over six feet tall and probably male. The only person at the farm who fit that description was my grandfather who would have been alive at the time of the photo. Amazing !!!  I looked at the photograph again and memories of the days I spent as a young boy climbing up the apple trees in the orchard eating the yellow transparent apples and looking across the river at the cemetery of the village Catholic Church where my grandfather was by then buried. I used to love sitting high up in that tree since the ripest apples always hung near the top of the tree but also I was able to look far off in the distance at the beach and the Atlantic Ocean. I remember thinking about my ancestors and how they had come across that ocean to an island and a new life in the new world. So now I am looking at this photograph which is now almost seventy-five years old which may have my grandfather in it who is looking down towards the orchard which has an apple tree which I would be sitting in  thirty years later where I would be daydreaming about the people who came over the ocean two hundred years earlier. Talk about your time travel!!!