50-year-old dashcam footage shows N.B. roads, towns and cities as they used to be
Films made in the late 1960s and early '70s shared by Provincial Archives
Going through the Provincial Archives of New Brunswick's YouTube channel is like travelling through time.
Dozens of films, resembling dashcam footage, were taken in the late 1960s and early 1970s. They depict long trips along New Brunswick highways through the windshield of a vehicle.
The footage reveals some homes and businesses that have since been demolished. And in some cases, it shows farmers' fields that are now forested over. Cities and landscapes are captured that have changed dramatically in the decades since.
This historical record is now available thanks to the work of Rob Gemmell, the sound and moving image archivist at the Provincial Archives of New Brunswick, who came across hundreds of these films years ago.
"It's been a while," said Gemmell. "I think it was like a decade ago that I actually processed the collection."
Gemmell has been working ever since to catalogue, label and share the collection online.
Origin Story
But who took all this footage? And why?
"This is part of a government series from the Department of Transportation," said Gemmell.
"They did highway surveys visually, basically running up and down all the major routes of the province for about six years, from 1969 to 1975.
"It looks like they were visually surveying so they could get an idea of what they needed to do with them," he said.
"Because a lot of them were dirt roads. A lot of them look like they were patched quite heavily."
Gemmell said the 16-millimetre films were kept by the Transportation Department until around 2010, when they were handed over to the archives. At the time, he knew he wanted to do something with the films, but it wasn't until recently that technology advanced to the point where it was possible to restore them well enough to be shared online.
"The scanning capabilities we had at the time were not really that great," said Gemmell. "I had looked into those types of scanners previously, but the cost of them was just beyond their budget."
"Technology has improved since then," he said.
There are about 40 videos posted online. If there's a roadway that some viewers are hoping to see, stay tuned. Gemmell said the plan is to put all 367 films online, eventually.
"I would imagine over time that will happen.
"Right now, the plan is to just work through a handful of them every week and try and maintain some sort of upload schedule."
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