Digital Mapping System Unearths Hidden Fort in Virginia
After years of shoveling his way through archaeological digs so intense that they injured his L5 vertebra, John Rutherford made his biggest discovery sitting in a cubicle west of Seven Corners in Fairfax County.
He was scouring 1937 photographs of Centreville on his computer screen when the star-shaped outline of a Civil War fort came into view, like an intricate painting on the landscape.
The fort is invisible in contemporary aerial photos. But those early images -- 215 high-resolution pictures taken by a U.S. government photographer from the sky as part of a national agricultural surveying effort -- offer a view virtually unchanged since the end of the Civil War.
"It was mind-boggling," Rutherford said. The "star fort," in a key strategic area on an eastward path toward Washington, just appeared. "Then you walk out in the field, and then there it is . . . something you saw in a 70-year-old photograph."
Read entire article at WaPo
He was scouring 1937 photographs of Centreville on his computer screen when the star-shaped outline of a Civil War fort came into view, like an intricate painting on the landscape.
The fort is invisible in contemporary aerial photos. But those early images -- 215 high-resolution pictures taken by a U.S. government photographer from the sky as part of a national agricultural surveying effort -- offer a view virtually unchanged since the end of the Civil War.
"It was mind-boggling," Rutherford said. The "star fort," in a key strategic area on an eastward path toward Washington, just appeared. "Then you walk out in the field, and then there it is . . . something you saw in a 70-year-old photograph."