Wintertime Posted July 4, 2014 Share Posted July 4, 2014 From: A century of change in maps Earlier this week, the U.S. Geological Survey released a fantastic Web site, built with the mapping company Esri, digitizing some 178,000 of the government's topographic maps dating going back to the 1800s. These old paper products have all been georectified, so you can layer maps from different eras on top of each other The Washington Post article focuses on the D.C. area, but as the article says, there are maps available across the country. I found some from as far back as 1897 for the Palo Alto area. Once you've loaded a map, you can download it. BTW, I may have mentioned this a couple of months ago when I was taking that mapping course on Coursera, but the ArcGIS platform on which this USGS project is hosted is available free to anyone to play around with. You can create a public account on the ArcGIS Online site and play around with a number of very spiffy features, including online apps for various types of story maps. Sure, it doesn't have the features of the desktop version of ArcGIS, but like I said: free! Quote Link to comment
+ADKer Posted July 5, 2014 Share Posted July 5, 2014 Holy cow, thank you for showing me this! Quote Link to comment
+UMainah Posted July 6, 2014 Share Posted July 6, 2014 Thank you very much for posting this. I love historical maps. It could even be useful for work. Quote Link to comment
foxtrot_xray Posted July 6, 2014 Share Posted July 6, 2014 You can also go to: http://viewer.nationalmap.gov/viewer/ and download geo-referenced historical USGS Topos. Quote Link to comment
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