Downloaded a bunch of Historic Topographic Maps 🗺

Most of them from the early 1940s or 1950s. I’m really quite interested in post World War II sprawl and changes to highways as the modern motoring age came to be.

The nice thing about the old USGS maps is they are all geo referenced, so you can load them into the QGIS for quick comparison – and you can use any 1:24k index to quickly remove the collars. Plus they’re available for a lot more years – going back to the 1890s compared to the 1940s or 1950s for aerial photos.

They will make for interesting blog posts in the coming months and they are fascinating to look at and study the progression of cities over the years. I do want to try and find some contemporary maps in the same style for comparison – I was going to use the DOT topographic maps I have from the early 2000s from the CUGIR website or something made with OpenStreetMap data but I’d like to get something from USGS in a similar scale and design for better comparison. I’ll have to dig around tomorrow.