The USGS *just* released all of their topos (like, ALL. every scale, every edition) for California and many other states. http://nationalmap.gov/historical/

woo-hoo! free to download individually. For cooler stitched together versions, check out the work already done by mattyj in this post

Matt Worster wrote:The USGS *just* released all of their topos (like, ALL. every scale, every edition) for California and many other states.

The USGS's map scanning project is a monumental amount of effort, and an incredibly useful tool to have available online. Not to take away from their accomplishments, but this isn't quite correct as they don't seem to have copies of a number of older historical topos. San Francisco, for example, lacks the late-1800s map series I used to build my historical layer. They have 1940s 1x2s of the SF bay area, but not the 7.5' series from http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/histopo/.

It's an awesome project, but quite a few seem to have been lost in the archives. Just because they don't have it, doesn't mean it doesn't exist somewhere else.

I was just finding that out my own, comparing to other downloads I've made. A limitation, but a lot more is out there than there was. It's the first time I've seen topos from my hometown in NH that are as far back as 1905.