Sanborn Fire Insurance maps document cities in extreme detail. Not only are the positions and shapes of buildings accurately mapped, but also rough outlines of the rooms, their construction materials, and even small details like if the building hired a night watchman. See downtown San Fracisco for example: https://oldinsurancemaps.net/viewer/san-francisco-ca/?sanbor...
Also a major plot point in Peng Shepherd's novel The Cartographers. Not a marvelous novel (though it's far better than anything I could write), but entertaining enough and an easy read.
I developed and maintain this site so I am both very happy to see it get posted here and also watching htop intently...
I wanted to point out it is a crowdsourcing project, so every overlaid page you see has been placed there by a person, often through large institutional efforts at universities, but also individuals just looking to learn about their hometown through these old maps. Thanks for the interest!
Funny how this pops up on hacker news today. I have been working on an off and on again project in the same vein. But instead of sanford maps, I have been ripping and downloading GLO surveys. I now have about 3TB worth of 200k+ mid 1800 surveys done by the USGS (GLO at the time). My next step was to create a method of presenting this data. Do you think that your OHMG would help me here?
Its a similar problem that you faced, stripping off the extra image data from the map, then overlaying them on a base map. I might have a slightly easier time, since these surveys mostly line up to existing township/ranges of the PLSS, not at individual house/street level like the sanborn maps. I've manually done the process many times, most in ArcGIS, but have used a few others (like oldmapsonline). Your site was new to me, and the presentation looks great.
Thanks for sharing. I went through a similar process recently, manually stitching together fire insurance maps from my hometown. A large part of the business district burned down in 1916, but maps from a couple of years earlier survived. It worked, but it was tedious. This would have saved a lot of time. Here's the link if anyone wants to check it out: https://fire.gorch.com/
Thanks for sharing, this is really nice. I've added it to the list of other projects I have on the site [0]. Feel free to get in touch if you want to use OIM for other years of Paris, TX.
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 23.8 ms ] threadI wanted to point out it is a crowdsourcing project, so every overlaid page you see has been placed there by a person, often through large institutional efforts at universities, but also individuals just looking to learn about their hometown through these old maps. Thanks for the interest!
https://oldinsurancemaps.net/map/YK41FR
And this shows no volumes available:
https://oldinsurancemaps.net/viewer/tampa-fl/#/center/-84.77...
Same thing for Key West, FL.
Its a similar problem that you faced, stripping off the extra image data from the map, then overlaying them on a base map. I might have a slightly easier time, since these surveys mostly line up to existing township/ranges of the PLSS, not at individual house/street level like the sanborn maps. I've manually done the process many times, most in ArcGIS, but have used a few others (like oldmapsonline). Your site was new to me, and the presentation looks great.
Here's an example of the type of survey I'm working with. https://www.oldmapsonline.org/en/maps/06317a09-5426-41e0-aa8...
[0] https://oldinsurancemaps.net/more-about-sanborn-maps/
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