A Useful Research Tool: Historical Topographic Maps ~ Wednesday, June 24, 2020

Historical topographical maps are a great way to track down historical right-of-ways of vanished railways and other bits of history. They've been available online for quite a few years now (for a while my go-to source for maps of California was a site hosted by the UC Berkeley Library). But even if you can view historical maps, it's often hard to correlate between "then" and "now" maps.

There is a new online tool, though, which makes this very convenient. Try it out at https://livingatlas.arcgis.com/topoexplorer/index.html.

On this site you can (1) search for a location by address, just like you would with Google maps, (2) click on an exact location on a modern-day topo view (leaving a red +), (3) select a historical map to view, (4) use a slider to fade between the historical and modern view.

Here is a location near Watsonville, CA, where we just spent a long weekend (hotels are starting to reopen around here; also, click on images for a bigger version):

Here is a view from 1912, when the Watsonville Transportation Company, a short-lived narrow-gauge electric interurban line, ran from Watsonville to a pier just up the beach from where we were staying:

And here's a blended view showing 1912 and 2020 at the same time:

Note that the slider is in the lower left, under the listing for the 1912 map.

More on this trip in an upcoming post!