Flying Over the Valley, 1939

Take a tour with us as we fly over the central Matanuska Valley in a small airplane on a fine bright fall day in 1939. Luckily, there’s a professional photographer from Pacific Aerial Surveys on board with his wide format camera, shooting at will out the open door at select scenes from elevations of a few hundred feet.

Unfortunately, all but 48 of the photographic negatives were lost in a Seattle flood. Fortunately, Aero-Metric Inc. acquired the negatives, and Steve Sparks scanned them and provided digital images for us to use for research, which were presented at our October ’07 annual meeting.

When projected on a screen, the high resolution of these photos let us zoom in to great detail. We could identify the farms, homesteads, cabins, crops, cars, and sometimes the signs on buildings. Those who were here in 1939 added many details, but we hadn’t seen these photos before, and time was limited. We had more questions than answers and resolved to look more closely and share our findings. This page should help us do that.

The photos posted here are 10-20% of the original file size due to space and copyright, but still good for research and identification. High resolution printed photos are available for viewing at the Colony House Museum and can be ordered below.

The photos are organized in a flight line, starting from west of Wasilla, then flying northeast to the Matanuska River, thence south to Palmer and over the Springer System, around the Butte, west over the town of Matanuska, Ag. Experiment Farm, Fairview area, then towards Anchorage. The 48 photos are listed sequentially in this flight line; PHS_ss_nnnn.jpg, where ss is the PHS sequence number and nnnn is the negative number. The photographer’s notes were found with the negatives, and reference the negative number. The photo locations have been noted on five sections of the 1937 colony map (also available at Colony House Museum): West (photos 1-5, 47), Middle (photos 6-7 and 41-46), North (photos 8-19), Southeast (photos 20-32), and South (photos 33-40).

Here are the files with the aerial photos:

West	1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 47
Middle	6, 7, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46
North	8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 17a, ,18, 19
Southeast	20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32
South	33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40

Look over the photos, zoom in on them, and post comments and questions on the PHS blog for the individual photo.

Prints can be requested online at info@palmerhistoricalsociety.org. You can pick them up at the CHM or next monthly meeting to save postage and handling.

8x10 inch: full photo, $10; enlarged section, $15. These will be printed for you by PHS on glossy photo paper.

11x14 inch: full photo, $20; enlarged section, $25. These will be printed at the local UPS store.

Commercial orders and larger photos should be ordered from Steve Sparks at Aero-Metric, 907-272-4495. We sincerely thank Aero-Metric for letting us use these photos. See them for other historical, current, and custom aerial photography.