New “photographs” of the Ohio Company’s pioneer settlements from 1788 to 1791 have emerged. How is this possible?

Historic Photographs Before the Age of Photography

Old photographs are wonderful for capturing a glimpse of our past. But photography was invented in 1827 and did not exist when the pioneer settlers arrived in Marietta in 1788. The only graphics we have of that historic event are drawings, maps and paintings. They offer priceless information about their subjects, but are often less than completely accurate.

Many of the paintings and drawings, like those by the famous artists Charles Sullivan and Sala Bosworth, were painted many years after the fact and often included objects never seen by the artists. (A good example of this can be seen in the traditional view of Fort Harmar compared to the old pictures.) Some are simply wildly romanticized depictions of reality.

So how do we see photographs of the 1780s and ‘90s?

By using the newest technologies – the computer and 3-D animation software – to recreate the scene as accurately as possible to what it probably looked like in 1788. The operative word is, of course, probably. History is, at best, full of interpretation and we cannot know for certain what the Marietta settlements really looked like. But we can come very close to creating a scene that gives the viewer the sense of seeing a photograph of the scene, and the historical accuracy of the visual representation is higher than it has ever been before.

A digital elevation map created by satellite is used to first establish the terrain of the Ohio Company lands with very high precision. Then interpretation is needed. 220 years ago the Ohio and Muskingum Rivers were much lower than today’s dammed up rivers. So river levels were lowered and the river banks were adjusted to be more sloping.

The next step required the creation of each individual building in each of the five original settlements, based upon all available information as to size, construction, placement and surroundings.

Then the landscape was developed into a natural looking setting by using complex grass and rock textures and adding trees and vegetation. The trees, according to the highly skilled surveyors in the Ohio Company party, ranged up to 10 rods in height. A rod is 16 feet. So the giant trees on the Ohio frontier were up to 160 feet tall and as much as 20 feet in diameter. More than twice the size of today’s largest trees.

Accurately portraying such gigantic trees threatened to distort the scene in the eyes of modern viewers and make the landscape appear too small. But with the addition of accurately scaled buildings, everything popped into perspective.

The buildings were created, literally, board by board and log by log. They are created in three dimensional space in the computer. Each board or log or other object is then “mapped” with a “texture” which is often a photo of the surface of a real life object.

Finally, the landscape, the nature objects and the man-made buildings are assembled into a 3-D world. The “camera”, or viewer, can move about within this 3-D world and see many different views, angles and perspectives. For the artist, moving about in this virtual world becomes a moment of discovery as each new view reveals more of what this bygone era must surely have looked like.

These are imperfect visualizations just as surely as were the painting and drawings that came before. But it represents the closest we have come yet to being able to generate new photos of scenes from a time before photography.