NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Historic US chart & map collections
From: Paul Hirose
Date: 2020 Jan 16, 13:03 -0800
From: Paul Hirose
Date: 2020 Jan 16, 13:03 -0800
NOAA has a large collection of historic American nautical and aeronautical charts scanned at high resolution. They can be viewed online or downloaded. https://historicalcharts.noaa.gov/ Topographic maps in the US have been the responsibility of another agency, the US Geological Survey. They too have an archive of historic maps: https://www.usgs.gov/core-science-systems/national-geospatial-program/topographic-maps Your search can specify the desired scale, but if you choose 1:24000 that excludes most of the old stuff, which was generally at smaller scale. The modern equivalent is "US Topo." These are separate quadrangles, just like the legacy paper maps. However, the publication cycle is much more frequent. They are not as artistic as the old topos, which were handmade. That shows especially in the lettering. Automation does not equal human judgement in that respect. One bonus is the orthophotograph included in the US Topo PDF. This is an aerial photograph which has been rectified to make the image coincide with the map projection. In other words, it's not the perspective view recorded by the camera. Depending on your PDF viewer the presence of the orthophoto may not be obvious. You have to select it from the list of "layers." If you just need to view the most recent map online, the seamless National Map is most convenient, especially if your point of interest is near a quadrangle boundary. Both the National Map and US Topo are accessible from the above link.
