Archives West Finding Aid

This collection is comprised of aerial photographs taken by or under contract with the United States Department of Agriculture from 1936 to 1979 and includes images of 5 counties in western Oregon: Benton, Lincoln, Linn, Marion, and Polk.

This collection includes multiple sets of photographs (arranged chronologically by year) for each county. Each set is comprised of two components: photo mosaics (Series 1) and photo tiles (Series 2-6). The mosaics, which serve as indices for the photo tiles, are representations of each county (typically one quadrant of the county per sheet) made by arranging reproductions of the photo tiles in geographic order. The mosaics include serial numbers for each tile and are annotated to indicate which tiles are held in the collection. The photo tiles are largescale photographs of quadrangles within each county. The photo tiles typically include the date the photograph was taken and the tile's serial number (as recorded in the container list). Information indicating the tile's position within the county is not present. For this reason, the mosaics must be used to correlate a photo tile to a specific area within a county using the serial number. Because the photo tile sets are incomplete, each mosaic includes annotations indicating which photo tiles are present in the collection.

Many of the collection's mosaics and photographic tiles include manuscript annotations, markings highlighting geographic features, and alternative numbering schema.