Google Earth Library

This collection contains approximately 900 15-minute historic USGS Topographic Maps covering almost the entire states of Connecticut, Delaware, Massachusetts, Maryland, Maine, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and Vermont.  Most of the maps are dated between 1890 and 1910.

There is a long history to these maps and how they ended up on my server and the role I played is but a very small one. My understanding of the story is that Christopher Marshall took a laptop and a scanner to various libraries and created the original scans, which consisted of 4 scans for the four corners of each map. JPGs from the original scans can be downloaded from http://historical.maptech.com/ and http://docs.unh.edu/nhtopos/nhtopos.htm. The next chapter to the story occurred a few years ago when Richard Utter took about 900 of the maps, stitched together the four pieces of each map and georeferenced them. Then finally, last week I received an email from Russell Nelson saying that he had all of Richard’s georeferenced maps on a couple DVDs and that he would be happy to send them to me. Now here we are a few days later and I have converted all of them to Google Earth SuperOverlays and uploaded them to my server. So I would like to personally thank Christopher, Richard and Russell for their contributions in making this possible.

This collection does not have all the topo maps that are available from the University of New Hampshire and Maptech websites. Richard appears to have scanned one revision of each 15′ map. Maybe someday I will find the time to add multiple revisions and the maps that are available in other scales. But that’s an enormous undertaking so probably won’t happen any time soon. Because there is only a single version of each map, I went ahead and removed the collars to create a seamless overlay for each state.

This collection has been added to my main Historical Topographic Map collection that has 1,000+ other historical topos. If you already have that Network Link in your Google Earth Places folder, then you should see the New England Maps appear automatically. If you don’t have it, simply download the KML file at the bottom of this post.  Choose a state, and then zoom down close enough for the maps to appear (the point where about 9 maps at a time will be within view). It may take a few seconds for the map tiles to load, especially when you first select PA or NY or have a slow Internet connection. An index is provided which shows the name and date of the map. If a map appears to be missing, see if it’s associated with the adjacent state. There are a few missing, especially in northern Maine.

Original Data From:	http://historical.maptech.com/ and http://docs.unh.edu/nhtopos/nhtopos.htm
KML Content Created By:	GE Library
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