by Joshua MacFadyen, Abigail Fenton, and Fabian Wegner, 7 April, 2026
Cross-posted from the Acadiensis blog.
The UPEI lab for Geospatial Research in Atlantic Canadian History (the GeoREACH Lab) recently added a new layer of aerial photographs to GeoPEI: the Prince Edward Island Historical Map Viewer platform (www.upei.ca/GeoPEI).[1] GeoPEI already contains aerial photos from 1935, 1958, 1968, 1990, 2000, and 2020, offering historical views of the entire province over nine decades. However, these new “oblique aerial” photos, taken by pilot Paul Sharpe between 1947-1952, offer a unique perspective. Unlike the top-down view, Sharpe’s oblique photos were taken from an angle, offering “bird’s eye view” or panoramas of the landscape, often at high resolution. Many places have a handful of obliques in their collection, but with over 500 images covering most parts of Prince Edward Island this resource will greatly help historians understand society, environment, and place in Atlantic Canada in the mid-twentieth century.
The photographer, Eric Paul Sharpe, was a skilled pilot, and during his flying career, he served in the Second World War, he flew for Maritime Central Airways, and he later operated his own business, Paul’s Flying Service in Charlottetown, PEI. Sharpe served with the Royal Canadian Air Force in the Second World War, flying Beaufighters and Spitfires during the Battle of Britain as a night fighter with the 410th Squadron. He also served with the 164 Transport Squadron based in Moncton, NB, and he was later transferred to Central Aircraft in London, Ontario, to test and ferry the famous Mosquito bomber.
After a short period flying for Maritime Central Airways, Sharpe founded Paul’s Flying Service, the first licensed flight school in the Maritimes. His business offered passenger transport, aerial photography, and daily newspaper delivery to 25 rural post offices. He ran the company from 1946 to 1952, building one of the Atlantic region’s leading flight schools. In 1952, he sold it to a former student, and Paul and his wife Norma Eleanor Osgood moved to Alberta and continued raising their family there. Paul retired from flying and started a new career in land transportation. Over his 15 years as a pilot, Sharpe flew 44 aircraft types and logged over a million miles and 6,017 hours in the air.[2]
In 2025, members of Sharpe’s family saw the work of the GeoREACH Lab and offered to share this impressive collection of oblique aerial photographs with us. We digitized the photographs and geolocated all of them, creating a geospatial index map which is now visible as a layer on the GeoPEI website. Clicking on each dot will produce a medium-resolution scan of the photograph which may be downloaded.
Figure 1: GeoPEI: the Prince Edward Island Historical Map Viewer platform, showing the Pauls Flying Service (PFS) Oblique Aerial Photograph locations, and an inset of the pilot, Paul Sharpe. Blue stars show the photos discussed in this text (1. The Windmill Lodge, Dunstaffnage, 2. Lakewood, Tracadie, 3. Campbell Cottage, Stanhope, 4. Greta Rogers’ Funeral, Brae)
The Paul Sharpe collection is made up of over 500 photographs and negatives taken between 1947 to 1952. His field book recorded a basic description of each image, which was often useful for geolocating each photograph. Because they cover so many rural and urban environments across much of the province, these photos add high-resolution imagery from a period when most air photos are too grainy to show details at the street and household scale. In this article, we focus on the task of digitizing, dating, and geolocating around 420 prints from the Sharpe collection.
The photography wing of Paul’s Flying Service peaked in his first two years, with 177 images in 1947 and about 200 in 1948. Early work emphasized tourism sites. However, by 1948 he had shifted to rural properties, photographing more than 55 farmsteads which he then attempted to sell to the occupants. Production dropped in later years, likely due to his growing passenger flights, which included service to the mainland. His later photos differed from earlier work, focusing on industrial activities, ships, and even a funeral. The near-vertical shots from this period suggest a change in style in his photography. This article showcases a small selection of his photographs and the various methods we used to identify some of the more elusive locations.
Tourist Homes: The Windmill (aka Breezy Hill) Cabins
In the mid-twentieth century, tourist cabins and motor lodges were more commonly found near the Island’s towns rather than Cavendish and other north shore destinations. The tourist business photograph that we had the most difficulty locating was surprising, considering it was a large structure with a garish faux windmill on the front. It also appeared on a densely settled rural road, which suggests that it was close to an urban area.
Sharpe took three photographs of this business in 1948 and labeled them “The Windmill” 1, 2, and 3 (PFS_48_040, PFS_48_041, and PFS_48_042). We spent hours looking at the photo and doing some research, but there was almost no indication of where this place existed. We nearly concluded that it might not be traceable because we did not have any evidence supporting the actual location of the site in the photo, or at least not visible in aerial photos of the closest years we had access to in GeoPEI (1935 and 1958).
Figure 2: Windmill #3, Breezy Hill Cabins, Dunstaffnage, PEI (PFS_48_042).
We searched for references in historical newspapers, but without success. We found a couple of 1937 newspaper articles advertising rentals at a business named “Windmill Cottage” in Hamilton, PEI.[3] Another from 1934 even mentioned it was located on Shipyard Road.[4] But while poring over historical maps and the 1935 and 1958 aerial photos on GeoPEI, we could not find any trace of “The Windmill” on Shipyard Road or in that vicinity.
A breakthrough came when we noticed that one of Sharpe’s 1947 photos of tourist cabins was almost the same as the 1948 photo. In fact, it was the same farmhouse and cabins, but by 1948 the Windmill structure had been added along with a large parking area by the road. He labeled the 1947 site as “Breezy Hill” cabins, owned by someone named Strang (PFS_47_090). Clearly this business was expanding, and they kept with the aeolian theme. It’s possible that the owners had purchased the building from the Hamilton-area business and moved it to this site in 1948. The 1937 ads suggest that the previous Windmill may have been closing or at least struggling to find customers during the Depression.
The trouble was that we still had no location for either the Windmill or for an operation owned by a Strang. However, we did begin to find references to “Breezy Hill” in newspapers and directories. In 1947, a classified used car ad in the Guardian mentioned the “Breezy Hill Cabins” were located in Dunstaffnage. A 1950 ad and menu for the “Windmill Lodge” noted that it was on Route 6 in the same town, and it even indicated that the business was located “On the Hill.”[5] We also discovered an entry for a tourist cabin named “The Windmill” in the 1950 Prince Edward Island Directory. The community was listed as Marshfield, which is directly to the west of Dunstaffnage. Since we now had the two photos and multiple references to an estimated search area between Marshfield and Dunstaffnage, we were certain it had to be located on St. Peters Road in-between these two communities. We also found a classified notice in the Guardian about a wristwatch that someone had lost on St Peter’s Road, between Breezy Hill cabins and a Marshfield restaurant named Sandy’s.[6] All we had to do was start at Sandy’s and start looking for “the Hill.”
We soon found the site of Breezy Hill cabins and the elusive Windmill. It was only 400 meters east of Sandy’s (PFS_47_087), and about halfway up the first hill in Dunstaffnage. The cabins and lodge were gone, but we were able to use the shape of the road and the presence of farmhouses to pinpoint the location of this short-lived business. The farmhouse remained, but there was almost no hint of the tourist cabins in the aerial photo map of 1958. A faint trace of the curved gravel driveway was all that remained. There was no sign of Breezy Hill cottages or the Windmill at all by 1968. Too windy?
Seasonal Homes: The North Shore
Locating seasonal homes was sometimes just as difficult as locating the Island’s more ephemeral tourist accommodations. Sharpe photographed some significant properties on the Island’s North Shore that are now gone. The Gregor Hotel was removed during a late-twentieth century expansion of the PEI National Park. Both the landscape and the built infrastructure visible in this photo have changed considerably. Another photo showed a property just outside of the National Park. Although the Park still hasn’t claimed it, the house was demolished recently. This recent demolition, and the fact that it was historically known by a different name from the one Sharpe selected, made it a challenge to locate. Sharpe labelled this photo the DeBlois Summer Home, and although this connected the property to the family of Lieutenant Governor George DesBrisay DeBlois, the home was better known as Lakewood (PFS_48_059).
The photo did not contain any evidence of which community it was taken in, and it had no other significant buildings in view. We knew that other pictures taken around the same time were located in Stanhope, so we hoped that the DeBlois summer home would also be in that area. By matching the body of water seen in the picture, we could narrow its location down to a few places in that larger area. However, it took us a while to identify the matching location of the house, since the aerial pictures of that area were of lower quality. We did manage to locate the house due to its contextual identification and the distinctive shape of the side road it was built on. The house itself does not exist at the location anymore, but aerial pictures of 2020 support that it was only recently moved or demolished.
Figure 3: Lakewood, 1948, Grand Tracadie, PEI (PFS_48_059).
Another seasonal home hiding on the Island’s north shore was the relatively newly constructed “Harvey Campbell” cottage and cabin (PFS_48_049). Due to the angle of the photo, we were unable to see any landscape features that would help us. Here again, context matters. Based on Sharpe’s flight pattern and photo record in 1948, as well as the vegetation that appeared to be growing on old farm fields, we suspected that this was Stanhope. In the years following the Second World War, this peninsula was beginning to attract people who could afford to build (and visit) seasonal homes. And some Islanders were enjoying upward mobility and postwar prosperity. With only a name to go on, we were able to find Harvey and his wife Blanche Campbell in voter registration lists, the 1931 Census, and their September 1942 wedding records.[7] Harvey G. was born in Montague in 1919 to a recent English immigrant mother (possibly a war bride) and a brakeman for the CNR.[8] He grew up in Hunter River and then in a working-class neighbourhood on Euston Street in Charlottetown. By 1953 he had moved with Blanche to the affluent neighbourhood of Brighton. Harvey was a manager, and he and Blanche had built one of the first cottages in Stanhope. Here, again, another photo provided the critical context needed to locate their seasonal home. In the nearby photo of Covehead Beach and the Stanhope peninsula, simply named “Lyle” (PFS_48_064), we can just vaguely see the Campbell cottage along the Gulf Shore Parkway.
Figure 4: “Harvey Campbell” cottage and cabin, Stanhope, PEI (PFS_48_049).
Mother’s Day Mourning: The Rogers Funeral
One of our most confusing mysteries was a series of oblique aerial photographs of an event known in the collection as simply “Rogers Funeral.” The original annotation on the back of each photo only said “RF1” through “RF17,” and in a subsequent typed finding aid someone added “Rogers Funeral” and occasionally “Roger’s Funeral” followed by the same numbers. The series includes 16 photographs taken, out of which we have access to 15. The year was not recorded, but based on their order in the collection we assumed it was 1950 or 1951.
Figure 5: Greta Rogers Funeral, Brae, PEI (PFS_51RF_005).
The images show a funeral with a large attendance of people at a rural church as well as a wake held earlier that day at a family home of the deceased. We found another contextual clue when we noticed that the home was located within walking distance of the church. Indeed, the home is visible in the background of one of the wide angle shots of the churchyard. The photographs document the funeral and show different angles of the wake and the burial. They also showcase many of the cars owned by Islanders in the mid-twentieth century. (PFS_51RF_001)
The only firm clue we had about those photos was the name Roger. It took us several hours of looking through death records in PEI to find out who “Roger” even was and why his funeral had such a large attendance with photos of it being taken out of a plane. Then, it occurred to us that Rogers might have been the last name, and the apostrophe used in error. We found a 1951 death record for a Charles Renfrew Rogers, who was a traveling merchant and the son of Lieutenant Governor Benjamin Rogers. However, Charles lived in Summerside and was going to be buried at the Peoples Cemetery in Summerside. This clearly was not the cemetery in our photograph, so the search continued. With the help of AI, we fabricated a list of every active or retired cemetery of PEI and the coordinates of the cemetery. Through that list we were able to locate the cemetery by matching each cemetery’s aerial photographs (especially the high-resolution 1968 imagery) with the photographs that we had of the funeral. This process eventually led us to a small cemetery in Brae, PEI, which matched the oblique aerial photographs perfectly.
Our curiosity drove us to identify the family of these mid-century mourners. Given the large number of cars in the parking lot and the fact that aerial photos were taken, this was clearly no ordinary funeral (PFS_51RF_010). Charles R. Rogers did not appear to have a close connection to Brae, although the son of a Lieutenant Governor might have drawn such a crowd. Since we knew the location of the grave and the year of death, we were able to find a list of “Rogers” buried in the Brae United Church Cemetery on the Find a Grave website. We discovered that the funeral was not for a man named Roger, which had been our previous assumptions, but for a young woman named Greta Russell “Rogers” Hewitt. Rogers was born in the community of Brae and educated at Mount Allison Ladies College. She eventually moved to the US, where she found success in the fashion industry. She also found love and married a jeweler, Sam Hewitt, in 1948. Just three years later, Greta died in California at the age of 38. Her family had her remains flown back to Brae for a funeral on Mother’s Day, Sunday 13 May, 1951.[9]
Figure 6: Greta Rogers Funeral at the Russel Rogers house, 1951, Brae, PEI (PFS_51RF_010).
Sharpe’s photos of the funeral were likely contracted as part of his flying service. They help reveal the importance of the Rogers family and the significance of Greta’s death to the larger community in Prince County. Greta’s family was relatively wealthy, as the barns and stately homes attest. They had been early movers in the Island’s fox farming boom, which is almost certainly how they were able to afford Greta’s private education, and, sadly, the return of her remains to the Island and the creation of these photographs. Locating the site of her funeral required a variety of sources and strategies, but the result enriches our knowledge of West Prince in the waning years of the fox fur industry.
Conclusion
The Paul Sharpe collection of oblique Aerial Photographs have been digitized and shared, with 420 geolocated images of Prince Edward Island in the late 1940s. The most important tool in the geolocation toolkit were the other maps and aerial photographs on GeoPEI, which helped to establish the context. Having at least a general sense of Sharpe’s flight path was another important clue in the search. Many of these photographs have not yet been seen by Island historians, and between Sharpe’s rich landscape views and his focus on both small communities and urban infrastructure, these views offer a new resource for social and environmental history. Together with the other landscape detail on GeoPEI and other repositories, we hope the Sharpe collection will give Atlantic Canadians a new view of the region’s agricultural and small-town economies almost eight decades ago.
[1] We thank the members of Paul Sharpe’s family sharing the prints with the UPEI GeoREACH Lab and for the permission to share the images on the lab’s GeoPEI viewer. We ask that those who download and reprint or otherwise share the images please acknowledge the source. A suggested citation is: “These photos were provided by courtesy of the family of Paul Sharpe, and they were retrieved from the UPEI GeoREACH Lab GeoPEI viewer, courtesy of the Canada Research Chair in Geospatial Humanities.”
[2] “Four Local Men Seek Student Pilot’s Permit,” The Guardian, February 19, 1949, p. 5. https://islandnewspapers.ca/islandora/object/guardian%3A19490219-005 Family summaries; Paul Sharpe Collection, UPEI GeoREACH Lab; “‘Flying Farmer’ Takes Over Paul’s Flying Service Here,” The Guardian July 31, 1952, pp. 5, 8.
[3] “Western Locals,” The Guardian, 14 June, 1947, p. 7, https://islandnewspapers.ca/islandora/object/guardian%3A19370614-007.
[4] “Summerside Guardian,” The Guardian, 2 August, 1934, p. 8, https://islandnewspapers.ca/islandora/object/guardian%3A19340802-008.
[5] “For Sale – 1940 American,” The Guardian, 30 October, 1947, p. 6 https://islandnewspapers.ca/islandora/object/guardian%3A19471030-006; “The Windmill Lodge,” The Guardian, 1 August, 1950, p. 7 https://islandnewspapers.ca/islandora/object/guardian%3A19500801-007.
[6] “Lost, Found, Strayed,” The Guardian 14 August, 1947, p. 6 https://islandnewspapers.ca/islandora/object/guardian%3A19470814-006.
[7] Harvey G. Campbell (1919-2004) and Blanche (Waye) Campbell (d. 2003). https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/237804348/harvey-g-campbell
[8] In August of 1925, Elsie Campbell returned to Canada from a summer visit in the UK with her two sons Harvey G and Clifford. They travelled from Southhampton UK to their home in Montague, 21 August, 1925. See the Canada, Incoming Passenger Lists, 1865-1935, on Ancestry (date accessed Dec 20, 2025) CANIMM1913PLIST_2000908383-00036. https://www.ancestry.ca/search/collections/1263/records/2954446 https://www.ancestry.ca/sharing/51075467?mark=7b22746f6b656e223a227642445a4d7270455551484e677a6b6e3832307864356b47662b436e72344a7672342f6b73594b633233453d222c22746f6b656e5f76657273696f6e223a225632227d
[9] “O’Leary and Vicinity,” Guardian, June 28, 1951, p. 16. Another article, recording a visit from Mr and Mrs Carruthers and their son, suggests that the funeral was held Sunday 3 June, 1951. “Howlan and Vicinity,” Guardian, June 5, 1951, p. 16.