The next earlier aerial was June 15, 2005.There are also shots from Mar. 5, 2003, and Mar. 22, 1996.

It’s pretty amazing at how much better the later images are.

Here’s a snippet of history from a website:

http://windsorc1sd.schoolwires.com/73075720144924/site/default.asp

Barnhart located just to the south of Imperial was named for C.L. Barnhart in the early 1900’s. At one time it was a tourist attraction. The Kohler City store with the old man in the rocking chair outside the building brought in tourists from all over to see such things as used false teeth and reading glasses for sale. When Interstate 55 went through, Barnhart became less prosperous.

I don’t remember the ham wreck, but I worked a beer truck crash on Ill 3 on the hill going outside Gale, near Thebes.

The truck had lost its brakes and ended up in the ditch, dumping its whole load of beer. Witnesses said that the first cars the pulled up loaded up so much beer that their frames were almost scraping the road.

While I was walking around shooting the mess, the cans would pop open spraying everything around with beer.

That stretch has been widened and repaved, but I could see scraps of beer cans along the shoulder for a decade after the wreck.

Dennis, the Interstate has saved a lot of lives, but it killed a lot of rural folks who didn’t understand the concept of divided highways. I worked a lot of crashes where drivers went the wrong way on that stretch between Cape and Jackson where 61 met I-55.

Two crashes I worked for The Missourian have never left my mind for long. I was home for Christmas break in 1968 when there was a head-on near the Gale floodgate. I don’t remember how many were killed, but I do remember the ground was littered with oranges or grapefruit that had been thrown out of one of the cars. I always wondered if one of the families had been coming back from a Florida vacation with souvenir fruit just like my family had done on a trip.

The road has been reworked and that exact spot doesn’t look the same except in my mind’s eye when I drive past it.

The second was a clear-day, straight-stretch of road where two cars inexplicably each crossed the center line and hit dead head on.

I got there while the victims were still in the cars. As I sat there listening to the ping, ping, ping of the cooling engines, I thought of two families somewhere that were going on with their normal day’s routines. Maybe they were doing the wash, feeding the kids, watching As The World Turns, whatever. In a few minutes, there was going to be a knock on the door that would change their lives forever.

I can’t hear Bruce Springsteen singing Wreck on the Highway without thinking of that day. The last two stanzas never fail to cause my eyes to mist over.

Last night I was out driving
Coming home at the end of the working day
I was riding alone through the drizzling rain
On a deserted stretch of a county two-lane
When I came upon a wreck on the highway

There was blood and glass all over
And there was nobody there but me
As the rain tumbled down hard and cold
I seen a young man lying by the side of the road
He cried Mister, won’t you help me please

An ambulance finally came and took him to Riverside
I watched as they drove him away
And I thought of a girlfriend or a young wife
And a state trooper knocking in the middle of the night
To say your baby died in a wreck on the highway

Sometimes I sit up in the darkness
And I watch my baby as she sleeps
Then I climb in bed and I hold her tight
I just lay there awake in the middle of the night
Thinking ’bout the wreck on the highway