Old West Town Maps – Sanborn Maps

Accurate maps of towns and cities and the old west are somewhat difficult to find. Many of the historical archives contain bird’s eye maps of significant sites. However, fewer sites contain actual maps of the towns. As I was searching around, I came across several plat maps from the Sanborn Company. Apparently, Sanborn was a mapping company that started shortly after the end of the Civil War. The primary product were fire risk maps.

Sanborn operated from 1867-2007 with maps from over 12,000 locations. My particular interest is the era from 1860 – 1890 but others may be interested in the maps from more modern eras. Many of the older maps have passed into the public domain and archived by several national and state organizations. Check the external links section on the Sanborn Maps Wikipedia article for a good list of organizations.
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Clowning around with Maps

Like many people, most of my map are hand sketched atop graph paper with a focus on functionality over form. Since the RPG Blog Carnival is focused on cartography, I decided to knock the digital dust bunnies off my copy of Campaign Cartographer. I pretty much suck at CC3 mapping. Although I did learn a bit more about layering and object manipulation. So I’ll call it a marginal success.

Every carnival needs a clown.

Rough Layout of Merakai

I also did a quick and dirty dungeon style map of a burrow. It doesn’t really fit with the original idea I had but its a map. I was intending to do a side view style map but cannot get the ground layer to appear even marginal. Marginal is successful for me. This one has text labels in CC3. They look fine right up until you export the map and crop it. I knew that. Rather, I remembered right after cropping the exported image. Maybe this time I’ll remember to not bother and just insert labels, when needed, with Gimp.

Burrow Map