Saturday, June 27, 2009

A 1955 Aerial Photograph of the Concordia Campus

Tobin Beck provided this image, which was scanned from an old photograph.

Aerial Photograph of Concordia Teachers College (now Concordia University) in 1955

The image has been uploaded to this Flickr webpage. Click on ALL SIZES above the image to see the larger, original size.

Tobin explained the photograph:

This photo shows Concordia in about 1955. The picture shows Weller Auditorium, which was built in 1954, and shows dirt has been excavated for the expansion of St. John's school, which was completed in 1956.

You can see the tennis court that used to be north of Miessler, but no courts yet down the hill (where the Science Building is now). You also can see the baseball field on the hill east of the football field. The "new gym" hadn't been built yet, so the Bye farm stands out northeast of the football field.

Along Hillcrest starting at the left foreground you can see the Cannon house, Pfeiffer house, Bek house, Heinecke house, and -- across Hillcrest north of the Bye farmhouse -- the Kirch house.

You also can see that the halfmoon and College Avenue appear white while Hillcrest and the other streets and roads are brown. The college used crushed rock on the streets it was responsible for, and the city used gravel, until those streets (Hillcrest, Columbia in front of St. John's school, Faculty Lane, the halfmoon, College Avenue) were paved in the summer of 1957 (not 1958 as I said in a previous post).

(Mike: I have corrected the previous post to say that the roads were paved in 1957.)


Steve Sylwester:

... "crushed rock" -- I never would have remembered that distinction. It seems that there was still some crushed rock around in the early 1960s, at least in some of the CTC parking lots.

Tobin Beck:

Once when we were playing baseball in the lot just east of the Sylwester house (when that lot was still grass, before it become a parking lot), somebody hit a fly ball across Brommer Drive into the gym parking lot, which was crushed rock. I chased the ball and in the process kicked some of the rocks. In one I found a perfectly preserved snail fossil that I still have.

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