USGS Topographical Maps

Charles A. Reeves, Jr.

Introduction
Many of us who have done genealogical research quickly became familiar with what most call "topo maps." These are maps the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) first started publishing in 1884.  The goal was to create a series of maps of the entire United States based on a grid defined by the latitude-longitude (Lat/Long) coordinate system used for many, many years to pinpoint locations on the earth.  Since the advent of the Global Positioning System (GPS) satellites, most folks now call these GPS coordinates. Following is information on what maps are available, how to obtain and use them, and how to use the associated USGS Geographic Names Information System (GNIS).
The maps became useful in genealogical research because of the amount of information they contained. The USGS formerly listed approximately 65 different kinds of things shown on the maps, which they call "Feature Class." These include: Airport, Bend, Bridge, Building, Canal, Cave, Cemetery, Church, Dam, Falls, Forest, Gap, Harbor, Hospital, Island, Lake, Locales, Military, Mine, Populated Place, Post Office, Range, Ridge, School, Spring, Stream, Summit, Swamp, Tower, Trail, Tunnel, and Valley, just to name a few. These names will be important when I discuss GNIS below, although as will be mentioned, most of the features of use to genealogical research are no longer shown on the latest topo maps, nor are they listed in GNIS. But as also noted, that GNIS data is still available, at least for Tennessee. The USGS has scanned every map they ever produced, and digital copies are available for download on-line, as well as new versions as they are produced.
Some may be wondering why, in this era of instant gratification, one would ever be interested in topo maps when most of us carry a phone or tablet where maps can be easily viewed. Those maps certainly have their place, and can show a substantial amount of information, but they sometimes don't contain the historical information needed in genealogical research.

A note about Soil Maps: I see these old maps come up on eBay all the time. I don't doubt they might be useful for some, but not for those doing genealogical research. They show very little detail.
The Early Maps

As stated, the USGS started publishing topo maps in 1884. This lasted until around the 1920s or 30s, when this project was terminated without being finished; some (perhaps many) of the planned maps were never completed.  These early maps covered 30 degrees of Latitude and Longitude.* They are sometimes called by their scale, 1:125,000, meaning that one foot on the map represents 125,000 feet on the ground. They typically cover approximately 28 miles east-west (longitude) and 38 miles north-south (latitude).
*Latitude and Longitude are measured in degrees, minutes and seconds, and just like time measurement, there are 60 seconds in a minute and 60 minutes in a degree. Latitude and Longitude are also frequently displayed as decimal degrees; e.g., 60.123456 (it can take a lot of decimal places to achieve the accuracy needed to locate something). Regardless, there is a connection between Lat/Long and time which we won't delve into here. For those interested, Dava Sobel wrote a really good book, since made into a TV movie, "Longitude," about the quest for a timepiece good enough to establish Longitude with enough precision so that voyagers, primarily those navigating sailing ships, would know where they were.

I've never found an index showing what early maps the USGS actually published, but I believe I have determined those that exist for East Tennessee. These are shown in the figure below.  A PDF version is also available.  More later on how to obtain copies of these maps, where the names of the maps will be needed.



 Later Maps
Around the early 1930s the USGS came up with a new grid system for the U.S. based on maps covering 7.5 degrees Lat/Long. These maps are the ones most of us are familiar with today. They also published 30x60 minute, 1:100,000 scale maps, and 1x2 degree, 1:500,000 maps and others, but those will not be discussed here.  The 7.5 degree maps are also called 1:24,000, meaning that one foot on the map represents 24,000 feet on the ground. So they have over five times the resolution of the 30 minute maps, thus showing much greater detail, which is probably the reason the USGS decided to go this route. These maps cover approximately 10 miles east-west, and 13 miles north-south.

Grid maps showing maps covering each state in the U.S. are available, although I've only seen the ones for Tennessee and Kentucky. They cannot be shown here because of their size; e.g., it takes almost 1000 topo maps to completely cover Tennessee.  But a PDF version is available.  As for the early maps, the names of the maps will make things much easier if you want to download copies from the USGS web site. A copy of the USGS brochure is also available that explains what all the symbols, etc. on the maps mean, "Topographic Map Symbols."

I do have an index map for the Smoky Mountain area, shown below.  A PDF version is also available.



How to Obtain the USGS Maps

As mentioned earlier, the USGS has scanned every topo map they have produced. Most of these are available on-line at the link below, although if you haven't visited this site recently, major changes have been made.

http://nationalmap.gov/historical/

A lot of information is available on this site, but of most interest here is downloading images of the topo maps.   A text query application was used in the past, but now you just need to click on Get Topo Maps on that page. Three options for downloading maps are shown on the page that comes up, but TopoView is my favorite.  When you click on the View and Download maps now button on that page you will be taken to a map of the U.S. where you can download maps by entering Location or the Map Name. As mentioned earlier, searching by Map Name is much easier because you will get a much shorter list of available maps.

Those doing genealogical research will find the older maps in the list much more useful than the newer maps.  For example, as of this writing, searching for the Concord, TN map yields a list of maps with dates ranging from 1940 to 2022.  The last map in the list which contains all the historical features is the 1968 edition, last edited in 1985.  The first 1940 map is interesting because it shows the Tennessee river boundary before Fort Loudoun Dam was finished, along with the anticipated inundation areas.

So what to do with the images once you get them?  You can certainly view them on your computer screen or handheld device. You can also get them printed at places like FedEx Office (formerly Kinko's). They are typically 22" wide by 27" high, but can be printed slightly smaller and are still readable; e.g., 16" x 20".

USGS GEOGRAPHIC NAMES INFORMATION SYSTEM (GNIS)
FOR TENNESSEE

As is the case for the downloading of topo maps, GNIS has also undergone major changes, which they call an “upgrade.”  The user interface system has definitely changed, but more important is that names of historical features that appeared on older versions of the topo maps have been removed from the database. They also no longer appear on recent versions of the maps. Thus, searches many of  have done in the past, particularly those related to genealogical research, are no longer supported.  The missing features include: Airport, Bridge, Building, Cemetery, Church, Dam, Forest, Harbor, Hospital, Mine, Oilfield, Park, Post Office, Reserve, School, Tower, Trail, Tunnel, and Well.

The information page about the new GNIS is here:  http://geonames.usgs.gov/apex/f?p=262:1:0

Clicking Search Domestic Names on that page will take you to the search page.   This link will take you directly there:  https://edits.nationalmap.gov/apps/gaz-domestic/public/search/names

However, the old feature names were still available for a limited time. The USGS  made the previous GNIS database available by states as comma-delimited text files.  Unfortunately, they are no longer available.

While they were still available, I downloaded the file for Tennessee and created a spreadsheet for it in LibreOffice. The very large spreadsheet (6 MB), sorted first by county, then by feature name is here:

TN_Features_20210825_sorted.ods

I have also created individual file for each county from this spreadsheet, available from the following links.
My old Excel 2011 (Version 14.6.1) will not open or import .ods files, but later versions will do so.  I also suspect any version of Excel should be able to open the original text-delimited file, which I did in LibreOffice to create these files, although it did take a bit of work to get them into the right format.

If you would like to try LibreOffice, it is free, although donations are appreciated, and is available in both Windows and Mac versions:

https://www.libreoffice.org/download/download/


This page last updated 29 May 2023


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