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PERRYSBURG, OH -- It is said that a picture is worth a 1000 words, but one Toledo company thinks a picture can be worth a thousand stories.

Vintage Aerial, based at Levis Commons in Perrysburg has over 25 million images of farms from across the nation taken over the span of five decades and is now offering those aerial perspectives of rural America to the general public via a new website. The images of individual farms in over 43 states were caught on film by the Toledo-based company State Aerial, which started sending pilots out with fixed cameras on their planes to take the aerial photos. State Aerial would then sell those photos to farmers and landowners who wanted a framed aerial view of their homestead. 

Over the years, the inventory of film increased to hundreds of thousands of  rolls of high resolution images which held not only the images of farms, but the story of changes to rural landscape that in many areas was giving way to urban development.  While State Aerial is still in business, it has licensed much of their archival film inventory to Vintage Aerial which believes there is a treasure of value in this archive. Not just sentimental value, but also historical and geographical, and Ken Krieg, the sales director for Vintage aerial believes it is "the most complete historical photographic record of rural America in the nation."

Besides hoping to sell the images to those people who might have personal and family attachments to the individual farms, Vintage Aerial is launching a website project to allow anyone to access the photos for free and then to allow people to attach their memories of that farm, so that the online photo will also be enhanced with stories, memories and a written history of a particular farm. Fritz Byers, the CEO of Vintage Aerial, who grew up on a cattle ranch in Kansas, says it is their attempt to capture the historical and cultural significance of these rural homes and farms before that context is lost to time.

At their Perrysburg headquarters, technicians and specialists are very busy these days trying to catalogue the rolls of film, encoding them and digitalizing each photo into a date base, so the web user can access or find a a property just entering an address. Paul Clark, the President of Vintage Aerial says that today's technology has allowed them to pursue this project. "We couldn't have done this ten years ago, we now have the technology to do it." Using Geospatial Information System GIS coding and original maps used by the pilots, the flight paths of the pilot's photo tours can be put into a database and mapping structure similar to Google Earth so that users can have easy access to the photos.