A couple of years ago I was playing with the King County (Washington) online parcel map and found out you can get pretty decent resolution aerial photography of

A couple of years ago I was playing with the King County (Washington) online parcel map and found out you can get pretty decent resolution aerial photography of Seattle and its surroundings from 1936. One of the things that struck me most was that a lot of the areas that are heavily wooded now were very much less so back then, presumably because 1936 was only a few decades removed from when they clearcut all of the old growth forest. If you think about it, that means someone like my grandfather who grew up here in that era would have had a much different understanding of the idea of a forest than myself, and not in an especially good way.