Tom Root Aerial Photographic Collection, 1949-1994, n.d.

Root, Tom (1923-)

Thomas F. (Tom) Root was born April 3, 1923 in Plymouth, Ohio, the son of P. H. and Anona Elder Root.  After attending public schools in Plymouth, he received his Bachelor of Industrial Engineering degree from Ohio State University in 1946.  Initially he made a living as a ceramics engineer and salesman.

Root’s interest in flying was stimulated by older brother Paul and Elmer Parsel, an early Plymouth aviator.  He learned to pilot an airplane at the Mansfield Airport in 1939.  Soon thereafter he owned a series of small planes, each better equipped for his needs.  Root’s avocational interest in photography, combined with his work as a pilot, developed into a second business in aerial photography after 1955.

Root was a self-taught photographer with an extremely prolific career taking aerial photographs in northwest Ohio.  His career spanned more than 60 years.  By the time he retired in 2001, he had taken about 100,000 pictures and put more than 3000 hours on his plane.  His first contracted job was photographing newly tiled fields.  On his trips, Root was both pilot and photographer.  In 1968, after renting for years, he purchased his own plane, a Super Cub N2224.  According to Root, the plane became like part of the family.  To take his pictures, Root would open the window, bank the plane, and take the photo out of the side of the plane.  Throughout his career, Root photographed areas as far to the east as Maine, as far west as Mississippi, up to Canada, and down to the Bahamas.  However, the bulk of his work was done in northwest Ohio; it included news-worthy events such as train wrecks, maiden voyages of ore carriers, the 1973 Willard tornado, and others.  Some of these photographs were distributed to the national media.

His extensive collection of photographs of northeast Ohio over the years serves as a topographical history of the region. Root was often hired to photograph businesses and to document progress on construction projects. One of his regular clients was the Cedar Point amusement park on Lake Erie (he was paid in tickets for that one).  His principal clients included the American Shipbuilding Company, Oberlin College, Denison University, many field tiling contractors, General Electric, Timken, Ford Motor Company, and General Motors.  His photographs were used for advertising, such as brochures and postcards.  The changes documented in Root's photographs are extensive.  Companies, and even industries, rose and fell during his career.  Tourism in particular expanded.  The land itself was significantly altered; the coastline was changed dramatically through construction and erosion.  Root remembers a section of the old route 2 erode into Lake Erie.  Looking back on his career, Root remarked that in all the years he was taking his pictures, he never realized he was becoming a historian as well, documenting all the change in the area.

In 1994 Tom Root contacted the Oberlin College Archives in anticipation of his retirement to offer, for a modest price, his photographs of the Oberlin area.  The Archives accepted his terms, and received 39 photographic prints and 28 negatives of the Oberlin College campus and town.  The Archives already held a number of Root’s photographs, received from College offices that presumably engaged Root to take them.

In 2008 he transferred a portion of his collection related to the Sandusky Ohio area to the Sandusky Library.

Sources Consulted

Finding aid for the Tom Root Aerial Photographs at the Sandusky Library in the OhioLINK Finding Aid Repository at

http://ead.ohiolink.edu/xtf-ead/view?docId=ead/OSsL0023.xml;query=;brand=default.

Correspondence, Tom Root and Roland M. Baumann, 1995 (see case file).

Author: Anne Cuyler Salsich

photographs - aerial photographs
photographs - negatives (photographic)
photographs - photographic prints
postcards