DS 341: Design Thinking for Transformation (Fall 2024) : Find Maps

Maps tell stories about space, place, and time using vivid imagery in a relatively small space. Just like textual materials, they are created with a viewpoint and purpose - maps are not neutral. Using close reading, you can "peel back" the layers on a map and use it to gain insight and make historical arguments.

This page will introduce you to several kinds of maps that may be useful in your research and suggest where you can find them.

Landownership maps, or plat maps, are overviews of who owns the land within each township. They are primarily useful for rural areas where individual own larger plots of land. They are also useful to watch the growth of urban areas over time as city development takes over farms.

In Wisconsin, these maps are based on  the Surveyors' Field Notes and Plats of Wisconsin - a collection of thousands of maps and written observations recorded between 1833 and 1866, when Wisconsin land was sub-divided into parcels for purchase and settlement.

• WI Original Land Survey Notes & Maps

  The field notes and plat maps of the public land survey of Wisconsin conducted between 1832 and 1866.

• WI Landownership Maps

  Maps and atlases of Wisconsin landownership, 1857-1960s.

• WI Land Economic Inventory

  Included on the maps are such features as houses, schools, churches, taverns, cheese factories, filling stations, and logging camps. These maps present a portrait of the Wisconsin landscape during the 1930s and 1940s.

Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps are meticulously detailed, large-scale lithographed, color-keyed street maps created for all sizes of cities and villages. The maps are at a scale  of 50-feet to one-inch on 21" x 25" sheets of paper. Sanborn Maps helped insurance agents in the late 19th and early 20th centuries determine the degree of fire hazard associated with a particular property.

Today, we use these maps to help understand the look of a city block at points in history. These maps were made only for city and town blocks, not for rural areas. We can look at Sanborns to see how cities grow by noting when certain blocks start getting mapped, and we can watch the construction of buildings as each element was noted on these maps (for example - a new porch or brick vs. wood construction)

• WI Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps

  Digitized maps run roughly 1883-1923. More recent maps are available in person at the Wisconsin Historical Society Archives.

• Library of Congress Sanborn Maps

  Find over 35,000 digitized maps from states other than Wisconsin.

During the Great Depression, the federal government created a program aimed at encouraging home ownership for middle-income white Americans. Instrumental in this was grading neighborhoods based on desirability and hazards. The agency responsible for grading neighborhoods, the Home Owners' Loan Corporation (HOLC), assumed and insisted that the residency of African Americans and immigrants, as well as working-class whites, compromised the values of homes and the security of mortgages. These rankings have set the course of individual and community wealth for the past 70 years. Now, the original maps and graders notes have been digitized and geo-tagged to view over current maps.

As you explore the materials in Mapping Inequality, you will quickly encounter racist and outdated language: descriptions of the "infiltration" of what were quite often described as "subversive," "undesirable," "inharmonious," or "lower grade" populations. Remember that these were the terms used when the maps were created, it doesn't mean they were right then, and it is not okay to use them today.

• Mapping Inequality: Redlining in New Deal America

  This digital collection provides access to thousands of redlining maps and notes from across the country, all geo-tagged over current maps.