The USGS's Historical Topographic Maps Collection

 

11 April 2014

"In 2009, USGS began the release of a new generation of topographic maps in electronic form, and is now complementing them with the release of high-resolution scans of more than 178,000 historical topographic maps of the United States. The topographic map remains an indispensable tool for everyday use in government, science, industry, land management planning, and leisure.

"As physical and cultural features change over time, maps are updated, revised and new editions printed. While out of date, historical maps are often useful to scientists, historians, environmentalists, genealogists and others researching a particular geographic location or area. A series of maps of the same area published over a period of time can show how an area looked before development and provide a detailed view of changes over time.

"The goal of the Historical Topographic Map Collection is to scan all scales and all editions of the more than 193,000 topographic maps published by the USGS since the inception of the topographic mapping program in 1884. ..."  http://nationalmap.gov/historical/index.html

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Submitted byJadeon Fri, 04/11/2014 - 14:24

Selected high-resolution historical topographic maps for the NE quarter of the US (WV and MD to Maine) are already available for free viewing and download at http://historical.mytopo.com/index.cfm.

The term "historic" here means as early as 1890s for some localities, but most maps are of 20th-century vintage.

Note that the USGS series does not include early 19th-century maps created from surveys done under other auspices (such as the ca. 1799-1810 surveys in Ohio).

 

Submitted byJadeon Fri, 04/11/2014 - 15:19

I forgot to mention that the maps at http://historical.mytopo.com/index.cfm are in *.jpg format, rather than in the oddball format (GeoPDF) offered by USGS at its map download site.  So at least for some States, the maps can be clipped, captioned and otherwise readily handled by standard image-handling software without much loss of detail, and are readily accepted for upload by sundry websites.

Thank you for the pointer to the USGS site, Elizabeth.

 

 

Submitted byEEon Fri, 04/11/2014 - 16:36

Thanks for the added perspectives, Jade. The jpg format is definitely nicer to work with!

 

Submitted byricksayreon Wed, 04/16/2014 - 11:02

Another perspective. First the Historical Topographic Maps Collection (HTMC) is a truly wonderful tool for genealogists. By historical USGS means anything they made prior to 2009 (they started in1884) when they switched over from paper maps to true GIS based products, now called US Topo. These new maps have multiple layers to include satellite imagery. But beware that they only include what is termed authoritative data. The implication is that if a feature such as a cemetery is not in the database of authoritative data, it will not appear on these new GIS products. So this makes the collection of scanned old maps even more important. All of the extant topo quads are now online except for the few that are missing from the USGS library collection. Volunteers are trying to find the missing.

As to format, many may find the PDF format peculiar, but if you download the TerraGo Toolbar for Adobe you will have full geospatial functionality on the map. This means, for example, that as you mouse over the map you will see the latitude and longitude displayed for the point your mouse cursor is positioned on. Pop that into your GPS and you can navigate directly to that remote cemetery. If I need a jpg I just do a screen capture with something like SnagIt and save it in the format I want.

And BTW check out the National Atlas, www.nationalatlas.gov. It goes away 30 September; many may want to download many of the useful PDF maps.

Submitted byEEon Wed, 04/16/2014 - 21:55

Thanks, Rick, for the added insight.