Andersons of Colonial N. Carolina

I try to get the oldest “base” maps I can find. There is a caveat to that however… I want “accurate” maps (meaning they are to an accurate scale). All that means simply is that I have ran across Civil War era maps of Virginia and North Carolina which date to the 1860s which show early areas… they are woefully inaccurate for what I do. The earliest maps that I have found can be found here:

https://ngmdb.usgs.gov/topoview/viewer/#4/40.01/-100.06

These are historic USGS topo maps. With certain limitations, I assume, they can be overlaid with modern satellite image maps (say Google Maps) and they hold up remarkably well. All of which sums up what I mean by my statement “the surveyed patents and deeds from the earliest colonial settlers are just as accurate now as when they were originally surveyed”. Let that soak in a moment. The measurements they took then are still accurate… even today. The difference is that they did not have accurate base maps to portray them at scale. The scale I use is one mile to one foot.

My major complaint is that they show railroads. Which are too damn NEW for my olde stuff. But then, at least they do not show Interstate Highways… smiling.

If you stumble across a modern map I am forced to use, it is because I cannot find an earlier version. I think in the past.