Google Earth KML File:

Google Earth BBS Discussion:

Description:

Over 2,000 historic USGS Topographic maps covering large areas of the United States. The maps are available in various scales and date back to the late 1800s in some areas. Currently, most of the coverage is in the western United States and California.

This is a huge project and I still have several 1,000 more maps that I’d like to add to this collection. If you’d like to help or contribute, please Contact Me Here. I could use server space, help georeferencing the maps, etc.

If you are a map librarian and would like to contribute to this collection, let me know. If you have maps that are already scanned and georeferenced, I can add them very easily. It takes much longer if they need to be georeferenced since that’s a time consuming and sometimes tedious task.

Currently, I am working on the 7 1/2" collection and many of those will give errors until I finish it up later this month.

Special Instructions:

to view the maps, just click on one of the indexes, find the area you are interested in, click on the placemark in the center of the oulined area, then click on blue hyperlink 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. If you’re computer doesn’t have a very good video card, you may not be able to open more than a few at a time.

Original Data From:

I have converted the maps for Google Earth, but I did not scan 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.

I would like to thank the above sources for making the full resolution versions of the maps available for download.

Below are several more great online historic topographic map collections. Unfortunately, the curators of these collections do not make the maps available for download and instead limit the ability to view them through web browser plugins, which I’m not able to convert into a format for Google Earth. Hopefully they will release full versions of their maps for download in the future. If you know of any other good online historic topographic map collections, please let me know.

• 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 MAGIC

Screenshots: