Historic Topos
UPDATE 3/26/09 – After a long hiatus, I’ve finally started working on a major update to this project and will be recompiling the entire collection as well as adding at least 1,000 more maps. This is turning into a huge project and would be great to get some help. If you want to volunteer to help out there are several things you can do to contribute:
- I’m looking for server space. Could probably use 40 or 50 gigabytes.
- If you’re a map librarian that’s looking at putting scans of historic topos online, let me know. I can easily convert them to Google Earth and add them to the collection.
- If you have access to historic topographic maps, but no way to scan them, let me know. I may be able to find someone with access to a large format scanner that might be willing to help out.
- If you know how to georeference maps, I have several 1,000 maps that need to be georeferenced before they can be imported into Google Earth.
- If you have Photoshop, I have something you can do.
If you want to contribute, please contact me
Currently, this collection has over 2,000 historic USGS Topographic maps covering several areas of the United States. The maps are available in various scales and date back as early as the 1800s in many areas.
Instructions:
Just click on one of the indexes, find the area you are interested in, click on the placemark in the center of the outlined area, then click on blue hyper link for the map year you want to view. The maps will appear under Temporary Places. You can delete them from there when you’re done.
Original Data From:
I have converted the maps for Google Earth, but I did not scan any of these maps. They were obtained them from many different sources including:
- University of Nevada Reno Mary B Ansari Map Library
- California State University, Chico Meriam Library
- University of California Berkeley Earth Sciences & Map Library and here and here.
- USGS Bay Area Regional Database
- University of California Santa Barbaray Alexandria Digital Library
- Fort Lewis College Center of Southwest Studies
- University of New Hampshire Government Information Department
- Maptech.com
- North Carolina State University GIS Data Services
- University of Washington – Early Washington Maps
- NOAA Historical Map & Chart Project
- New Jersey Geological Survey
- USGS Gulf Coast Historic Topographic Maps
- Pennsylvania Spacial Data Access
- Delaware Geological Survey
- SDAG Historic Topographic Maps of San Diego County
- Historic Topographic Maps 1:250,000, University of Texas Austin.
- University of Hawaii Manoa Library
I would like to thank the above sources for making their collections available to the public for download. Historic topographic maps are a valuable public resource and it’s good to see libraries acting in the best interest of the public by making the maps available to the public.
Please let me know if you know of any other online historic topographic map resources and I will add it to the list.
Below are several more great online historic topographic map collections. Unfortunately, the curators of these collections do not make the full maps available for download and, in some cases, attempt to claim copyright protection (even though I’m pretty sure scanned USGS topographic maps are exempt from copyright protection). Hopefully the curators of these collections will someday come to their senses and make their full scans available to the public domain. These maps are a national treasure and belong to the public.
- Univeristy of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- University of Tennessee Map Library
- University of Alabama (Click on a State then look for link to Out-of-Print Quadrangles at the top of the page)
- Broer Map Library
- Florida State University Visual Collections (Search for Topographic)
- University of Connecticut USGS Topographic Map Mosaics
- University of Chicago Library
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| Original Data From: | Various. See Above. |
| KML Content Created By: | GE Library |
| Access From: |  |
| More Info: |  |
The San Leandro 7.5′ quad in california is incorrectly referenced and does not line up with the appropriate features. Can you fix?
I would to find the USGS index for the 15′ quadrangles for the New England states and New York.
Does anyone know where I can get a copy of these?
Maine, New Hampshire & Vermont I am most interested in at the present, but would like the others in the future.
There is an online index of these here.
http://docs.unh.edu/nhtopos/nhtopos.htm
Not sure if that’s what you’re looking for.
I’m a sculptor planning to make a globe. I am looking for a cut & fold design of the world map in order to transfer land masses to a sphere accurately. Does anyone have one of these, they used to be quite common but I can’t find one anywhere since satelite imagery became available.
Cheral, I have no idea how you’d do that. It would be like trying to make a ball out of a flat sheet of paper. Google “Map Projections”. Find the projection that would work best for you. Then Google the name of the Projection. That would be my recommendation for you. Good luck.
I was unable to find any maps for the Los Angeles area (specifically the Malibu / Santa Monica mountains vicinity) through those source links. Are there any available for that part of California?
i want to get historical map of gangetic plain , india
I have a problem for updating topomap by using Satellite Imageries. I need best solution from recrification to database update and map printing.
You need to update the link for the University of Connecticut’s collection. They have rebuilt their online collection so that the online topo maps work in a Google maps application as well as in software that can read WMS data.
visit http://magic.lib.uconn.edu/mash_up/topos.html to view the data.
Thanks, I uploaded the link to Univ. of Connecticut’s collection.
This is great! i was one of the people who started the map scanning at CSU Chico about 8 years ago. USFWS paid for some of the start up costs,but i think its the library there that has really carried the torch all these years. I always dreamed they would be accessible like this someday.
http://libweb.uoregon.edu/map/map_section/quad_list.htm
Great collection of historic General Land Office (GLO) 7.5 Quads. Many date back to 1850’s. Would be nice to see these available in GE.
I would like to find the coordinates for a piece of land I own and need to get the ‘meets and bounds’ for it.