The Sewall Company Aerial Photographs are a small representation digitized from nearly 1 million aerial images donated by the James W. Sewall Co. in Old Town, Maine. The collection contains original aerial photography of Maine and New England captured by Sewall over the span of 65 years.
Founded in 1880, Sewall began offering aerial photography services in the 1940s. The photo archive the company produced captures aerial views of nearly every part of Maine, as well as various locations in New England, Alaska, Canada, and the southern and central U.S. Many regions were photographed multiple times over the course of decades.
An article describing three example applications of the photographs may be found here.
The archive is expected to be available to the public in late 2020.
A note on the titles:
The original filenames of the received digitized images are often included in the title, and generally have the form:
xx-yy_ABC_filt
Filenames may contain some or all of these parts.
The first number is the flight path number. Film rolls normally have images from more than one sequentially numbered flight paths.
The second number represents the sequence of images taken along a given flight path.
The text may indicate a town or region, the company ordering the photographs, or other designators.
The "filt" suffix is present in many filenames, and indicates that the image was filtered during the digitization process.
