Find and download vintage USGS topo maps

By John Nelson

The new Historical Topo Map Explorer is out of beta and ready for you to dive into a collection of over 180,000 beautiful vintage USGS topo maps! Use this updated Living Atlas app to geographically browse, download, export, and even animate, these cartographic objects of joy. Here’s how…

0:00 Adventurous introduction
0:23 Navigating the map and finding topos
0:40 Sorting and filtering
0:51 Selecting a topo map
1:07 Downloading or exporting a topo map
1:38 Pinning a collection of topos
2:16 Making and downloading animations
3:22 Draping modern hillshade over vintage topos
3:29 Copying topo details

Many thanks to colleagues Calvin Manning for development, Ken Baloun for management and testing, Jinnan Zhang for development advising, Aileen Buckley for coordinating the topo library, and Philip Royal for service architecture. We hope you use the Historical Topo Map Explorer to find the maps you are looking for, and while you’re at it, plenty of maps you weren’t. When it comes to finding the right map, there’s a lot to be said for stumbling on some treasures along the way.

Love, John

John Nelson

I have far too much fun looking for ways to understand and present data visually, hopefully driving product strategy and engaging users. I work in the ArcGIS Living Atlas team at Esri, pushing and pulling data in all sorts of absurd ways and then sharing the process. I also design user experiences for maps and apps. When I'm not doing those things, I'm chasing around toddlers and wrangling chickens, and generally getting into other ad-hoc adventures. Life is good. You might also like these Styles for ArcGIS Pro: esriurl.com/nelsonstyles

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