The Perry-Castaneda Library Map Collection at the University of Texas at Austin has begun an ambitious project to scan all available pre-1945 USGS topographic maps for all US states that don’t currently have them available online. They are starting with Texas and working their way out from there. As of today, Texas, New Mexico, Louisiana and Arkansas are available online and more states should become available in the coming weeks and months. The scans are available in JPG format and are public domain.
I’ve also heard rumors that the USGS may be working on a nation wide scanning project of historic USGS maps. Unfortunately, I’ve been hearing those rumors for many years and have yet to see any results.
I hope to get these added to the Google Earth Library collection of historic USGS topographic. But that will also be an enormous undertaking because each map has to be georeferenced, and converted into KML/KMZ format.
I’ve been playing around with the idea of organizing a group of volunteers to help with the process of georeferencing historic topo maps. I will try to get the ball rolling on this effort. Basically, I’m looking for volunteers to download the maps, georeference them, fill out a few details about each map in a spreadsheet, and upload the georeferenced map back up to an FTP site. The resulting georeferenced maps would remain in the public domain. I could also really use some donated web server space (100+ gigabytes) that doesn’t have restrictions on number of files or hosting files for this purpose.
If you want to contribute, contact me through the form on this page. If you have contacted me previously, I will be reaching out to you in the next week or so.
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This is a collection of historic maps and birds eye images of Washington DC during the late 1800s and early 1900s. The collection includes 58 highly-detailed topographic maps that appear to have been completed in the 1870s and 1880s of the outlying areas of Washington DC. These were a bit tricky to georeference, but they turned out to be amazingly accurate given the time period in which they were originally surveyed. The topographic maps show the locations of buildings, military installations, horse race tracks, etc, as well as general land use.
The birds eye images have been placed in the approximate location of the original artist’s perspective. These are very high resolution images so go ahead and zoom in to see all the detail.
All of the maps and images are about 3-5 megabytes and may take a minute or two to load. The following maps/images are included.
- 58 topographic maps from the 1870s/1880s (from NOAA Historic Maps)
- 1792 plan of Washington DC (from NOAA Historic Maps)
- 1851 map of Washington DC (from David Rumsey Historic Maps)
- 1861 map of Washington DC (from David Rumsey Historic Maps)
- 1871, 1883, 1888, 1916, and 1923 Birds Eye images from various locations around Washington DC (from Library of Congress)
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This set of files shows the configuration of United States and Territories every 10 years from 1790 to 1920. You can watch the United States start out with the 13 original States (actually I think it was 14 by 1790) and expand westward to the Pacific. I believe the only thing to change after 1920 was Alaska and Hawaii being changed from Territories to States, which is why I stopped at 1920.
The original shapefile data was obtained from the National Historical Geographic Information System. I simplified the polygons to allow them to display in Google Earth.
Each decade is an approximately 1 to 1.5 megabyte file that will take a minute or so to download and be processed by Google Earth, depending on the speed of your Internet connection and computer.
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