From the Air: The Photographic Map

Every map in the maps fragment was drawn from the ground until the twentieth century added a map drawn from the sky, and this entry follows the photographic map's succession over Mishawaka whole. The first systematic aerial coverage of this county was not made for mapmaking at all: it was the federal farm programs' photography. Beginning in the late 1930s the Agricultural Adjustment Administration — its work continued by the Agricultural Stabilization and Conservation Service — flew the farm counties of the United States county by county, at scales fit for measuring fields and checking crop compliance, and St. Joseph County's fields, Mishawaka's fringe among them, entered the photographic record on those flights. The prints became the county's first true aerial portrait: the mill city at its 1930s extent, the river's course, the farm grid of Penn Township unbroken east and south of the streets. The second epoch is the topographic one. The U.S. Geological Survey's postwar quadrangle program worked from aerial film, and the 1958 Mishawaka quadrangle the maps fragment carries — the sheet on which the city's modern cartography rests — was compiled from the 1950s photography flown for it: the photographic map now standing behind the drawn one, photo-revised forward in later editions. The third epoch standardized the sky. The National High Altitude Photography program (1980–1987) covered the nation from high altitude in black-and-white and color-infrared; its successor, the National Aerial Photography Program (1987–2007), reflown on a five-to-seven-year cycle, put a standardized, map-grade photographic coverage of this county in federal hands and made the digital orthophoto quadrangle — the photograph corrected to the map's geometry — an ordinary public record. The present epoch is the National Agriculture Imagery Program, flown by the U.S. Department of Agriculture from 2003 and refreshed on Indiana's cycle ever since: leaf-on, meter-and-better imagery of the whole county, served free through IndianaView and the IndianaMap, and standing behind the parcel viewers and the city's own geographic information system. That is the succession entire, at the size the programs' own records give it: farm-program film in the late 1930s, survey film behind the 1958 sheet, the standardized national programs of the 1980s and after, and the agricultural imagery program's current coverage — the photographic map beneath every map of Mishawaka a reader can now call up, its first frame flown not to portray the city but to measure the farms at its edge.