Nearly 90,000 high resolution scans of the more than 200,000 historical U.S. Geologic Survey topographic maps, some dating as far back as 1884, are now available online.
The Historical Topographic Map Collection includes published U.S. maps of all scales and editions. The historical maps are available for digital download to the public at no cost in a GeoPDF format. Printed copies are also available for $15 plus a $5 handling charge from the USGS Store.
These “older maps are a historical treasure,” said Mark DeMulder, director of the National Geospatial Program at the USGS said at the Geospatial Summit held yesterday by 1105 Media in Herndon, Va.
The maps all contain geographic referencing data, so it is possible to overlay and compare older maps with more current maps, DeMulder said.
“This effort is of great consequence for the research community,” said Dr. John R. Hébert Chief, Geography and Map Division, Library of Congress, in a statement released by the USGS. Working in partnership with the Library of Congress and other map depositories, the USGS will build a complete master catalog and plans to duplicate maps that may be missing from those sources.
The maps provide invaluable snapshots of America’s landscape and settlements that promise to be of interest to genealogists, historians, anthropologists, archeologists as well as the scientific community. Some of the topographic maps date back to the time of John Wesley Powell, a formidable surveyor who served as director of the USGS from 1881 to 1894 who saw the critical value of topographic mapping in understanding the nation’s vast landscape.
However, the collection of historic maps has generally been available to those willing to make the trip to the USGS Reston Map Library or other archive sites. The project is part of the USGS National Geospatial Program (NGP) continuing efforts to support the mapping and location-based data needs of the nation.
The maps are just one of many collections of geographic information that the USGS has been making available to the public online, said DeMulder.
One of the richest is a national collection of data and mapping tools, called the National Hydrography Dataset, that captures information of natural watersheds and waterways for the entire U.S., making it possible for scientists as well as regional planners to model the behavior of streams and waterways.
“There are more than 20 million individual stream segments” in the dataset, said DeMulder making the information comparable to the underlying database of streets and roads, including lane direction, used by GPS-based roadmapping systems.