2021-12-21 — updated 2023-10-04
Here you’ll find historical USGS quadrangles from the national map. Both the USGS and UC Berkeley Library have scanned their historical map collections and provided them for free download. Unfortunately, while extremely high resolution, these scans are raw representations of the original documents. As a result they’re scanned at odd angles, contain the original map borders with legends and white space, and often have blemishes and markings. Useful for GIS, but not enough to give a good picture of the historical landscape as a whole.
Via a small computer vision script and my Quilt utility, I’ve automatically cropped and corrected the original images and stitched them together into a zoomable in-browser map. It’s like having Google Maps in 1968.
Maps
1899 - 15’ beta
scans provided by UC Berkeley Library
scans provided by UC Berkeley Library
scans provided by UC Berkeley Library
Known Issues
- White balance isn’t corrected to compensate for differing rates of paper yellowing for Berkeley scans. USGS scans have already been corrected but usually contain more visual blemishes (typically cataloging stamps).
- Alignment still isn’t perfect between different maps.
- Black borders between maps are still visible in most cases.
- Quilt still has some bugs with precision when calculating pixel offsets. This can cause some white gaps to appear at certain zoom levels, and maps to shift to the left or right when zooming.