Scanning the USGS Historical Topographic Map Collection

An 1884 survey of Massachusetts, the first state to join the Cooperative Topographic Mapping Program, printed in 1886 at 1:62,500. USGS.

"A government cannot do any scientific work of more value to the people at large than by causing the construction of proper topographic maps of the country." — John Wesley Powell to Congress, December 5, 1888

The collection

The USGS National Geospatial Program is scanning every published USGS topographic map at 1:250,000 scale and larger, printed from 1884 — when topographic mapping began — to 2006. Begun in 2011, the goal is a free public digital archive.

• Why: for more than 125 years, USGS maps have portrayed the nation's geography. Before 2006 they were drawn by hand and lithographed; since then the USGS has issued the digital US Topo series.
• Old maps matter: out-of-date maps help scientists, historians, environmentalists and genealogists. A series of editions can show a place as early as 1884, before development, and how it changed.
• Saving originals: historical maps survive in few collections, so the USGS is creating a catalog and digital archive of the irreplaceable Reston Map Library collection, available through the USGS Store and The National Map.

"Cartographers in the Field," a Depression-era oil painting by Hal Shelton (1940), showing early mapping tools — an alidade and stadia rod for distances and elevations, and a plane table for sketching contours. It hangs in the USGS library in Menlo Park, California. Photograph by Terry Carr, USGS.

How it works

• Georeferenced: each map is scanned "as is" and tied to earth coordinates, so users can measure distance and area, read coordinates, and overlay it on other data in a GIS, including The National Map.
• Formats: GeoTIFF with embedded metadata, and compressed GeoPDF that any PDF reader can view (the geospatial tools need the free TerraGo Toolbar).

Done so far

• published specifications for scanning and methods for accurate, high-resolution georeferenced images;
• cataloged and created metadata for all scanned maps;
• supplied historical maps to support US Topo;
• archived files with the National Archives and the Library of Congress;
• made about 200,000 scanned maps freely downloadable, with Federal Geographic Data Committee-compliant metadata.

Next

Scan maps not yet available as they're found, and release historical quads as GeoTIFF files, planned from early 2015. Browse at nationalmap.gov/historical or The National Map.

Sources

Based on Scanning and Georeferencing Historical USGS Quadrangles, by L.R. Davis and G.J. Allord, USGS Fact Sheet 2011–3009 (version 2.0, May 2015), U.S. Geological Survey (DOI); a work of the United States government in the public domain. The pictures and Powell's words come from the fact sheet's PDF.