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Finding Farms While They Last

April 22, 2009 - PALMYRA -- For 20 years, Steve Berry wandered the back roads of New England, driving from farm to farm selling aerial photos of fields and farmhouses.

Now he is on the road again, logging 60,000 miles a year to make sure the memories of those farms don't disappear.

Berry, age 67 and retired from his job as a salesman for an aerial photo company, learned a few years ago that a rival company, State Aerial Farm Statistics Inc., had at least 25 million aerial photos of farms squirreled away in a warehouse in Toledo. The photos date back to the 1960s and are a visual record of the changing American rural landscape.

Berry convinced State Aerial that the vintage photos, combined with the farms' histories and stories of the people who lived there, would make good books – books people would be willing to buy. They hired him to do some old-fashioned shoe-leather reporting county by county.

"The only way you can do this is by going door to door," said Berry, who grew up in Wiscasset and Bath but has spent the last 31 years in Vermont. "Find them first, and go visit with these people. If we wait any longer, the folks that we're getting this information from will be gone and we'll have a stack of film with no identity, worthless to everybody."

Berry has 1,565 rolls of film from Maine, each roll containing 36 exposures. In recent weeks, he's been driving around Somerset County, and plans to be in Aroostook County by May 1. He travels five days a week, trying to set foot in every Maine county and looking for volunteers to help him track down the farms and interview the residents.

Berry is focusing his early efforts on more rural parts of the state where roots run deep and people in the community are more likely to remember who lived in a farmhouse two or three generations ago.

"What I'm trying to do right now is stay in the farming areas because I know there's a connection to the past there," Berry said. "I've tried a little bit right in Kennebec, like towards Augusta, and they've lost their identity, unfortunately. And I'm sure a lot in Cumberland County has, too."

Finding the farms in the older photos is no easy task. There are no addresses on them, just a code on the back that tells what year they were taken. No one saved the maps that the salesmen who peddled the aerial photos decades ago used to find a particular property.

Sometimes the farms are simply no longer there. One farm Berry tried to track down in the Palmyra area is now a Wal-Mart.

"There's a good portion of them that are totally gone," he said.

That doesn't surprise Gale Astles, president of State Aerial, who has owned the business since 1962.

"Sixty to 70 percent of all the farms from the '60s and '70s are either missing or in disarray," he said. "We used to be able to make a half-decent living with 100 acres. That's gone by a long time ago."

Astles said his vintage library of photos has been digitized and is now locked safely behind fireproof doors to preserve these images of the past. He sells the framed aerial photos through a Web site, www.vintageaerial.com, but also allows academics and historical societies to have access to the collection for research.

"We had four professors from Michigan State interested in the hip barns that are slowly disappearing," Astles said.

Steve Bromage, assistant director of the Maine Historical Society, said Berry's project "sounds very intriguing," particularly in light of modern debates over the decline of family farms, development and suburban sprawl.

"It just strikes me that you could do an interesting then-and-now kind of approach," Bromage said, "or (the photos) might be an interesting tool to contemplate the changing nature of our landscapes and community."

Once Berry locates a property shown in one of the 5- by 7-inch black-and-white photographs, his goal is to find out who lived there "as far back as I can." Most people are friendly and appreciate what he's trying to do, he said.

Berry has had a lot of practice putting people at ease. During his two decades selling aerial photos of farms, he had 15 to 18 conversations a week in farmers' kitchens.

"Every farm you visit," Berry said, "the first object that you run into is a dog, and you have to bond with the dog first."

Berry has already turned up some interesting stories about some Maine farms. He found one in Hartland that had a bomb shelter built during the Cold War.

"It's solid concrete, about 15-by-15," Berry said. "She said, 'It's been there since 1960, but I haven't been in there in years.' "

He's also interviewed the current occupants of the Palmyra farm where James White, co-founder of the Seventh-day Adventist Church, was born.

Many of Berry's photos were taken in the 1960s, the decade that was "the beginning of the end of the small family farm as we know it." He hopes his project will help document the changes these farm communities have experienced over the years, in the voices of their own residents.

Soon, he said, "they are going to be gone, and they're going to take all this beautiful information with them."


By MEREDITH GOAD, Staff Writer, Portland Press Herald, April 19, 2009


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