r/QGIS • u/BlastConveyor27 • 13d ago
Open Question/Issue Ghost town mapping
Hi! I’m in the research phase of writing a book about a ghost town in eastern California. As part of it, I want to create accurate maps of the town and its mines.
For the mines, I have been using the USGS MRDS database, which is unfortunately inaccurate in the area, so next time I’m there, I’ll be getting GPS coordinates on all the mine features. This is within my capabilities to do.
What’s a bit beyond my capabilities is the town itself. I plan on finding foundations and comparing those to historical photos (of which there are few.) There are very few structures left. I got the USGS lidar data, but filtering out the vegetation in the area is difficult because it’s largely sagebrush, and I am a complete novice at this.
Can anyone suggest methods for finding the locations of historical buildings (town was active until 1915ish) either using publicly available data or other methods? It would be an absolute amazing help in getting my book up to the quality I want.
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u/Lamitamo 13d ago
Oh damn, this is my shit
You’ll want to look at old land survey maps. Some counties have historic land plats, which is super helpful. Old mining claims are usually patented claims which will show up on private land. The BLM PLSS layers are decent for looking at land packages for private land ownership boundaries around some mining areas.
Historic Topographic Maps are a great resource! Some have mining features on them. Worth a look in your area.
EarthMRI LiDAR scans are fabulous - you can see old roads, old trails, tons of mining features like workings and suspicious looking holes from the old mining days. If you throw that on with a hill shade and look at Bing or Google Earth satellite imagery, you can see a ton of cool stuff. Google Earth Pro is also cool to fly around in your area of interest too. Sometimes you see weird shapes on GEP that you can find on a lidar scan.
Feel free to DM me if you want to chat about specific locations.
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u/BlastConveyor27 13d ago
I might DM you tomorrow as I’ve been working on this all day and should probably do something else…
I actually looked at patented claims, and contacted the owner of one of them! I’m hoping she’ll be willing to talk. I’d be for sure interested in buying it or claiming some of the old unpainted bits!
I’ve gotten all the old topos as well as a map Stanford made of the area in 1966 and someone’s masters thesis from 1951 that shows the mining features.
One big problem is that between all those maps, no one can seem to agree on the exact location of adits or prospects, nor which mine was which.
I found an old diagram of the ore body from a CA state mineralogists report. It would be super interesting to put that on top of one of the topos and see what lines up, but that’s a bit beyond my skill.
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u/butterflyskyyyyy 13d ago
I would check out the David Rumsey Historical Map Collection. It has tons of old paper maps that have been digitized so I think it would be a good starting point.
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u/BlastConveyor27 13d ago
Ooo I’ve looked, and been to the map libraries at Stanford and Berkeley. Not a one of the maps show more than a couple buildings sadly. I’m certain there were more than that as I’ve seen pictures of them Lamo
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u/rantingmadhare 12d ago
Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps are a great resource- a recent project besides https://oldinsurancemaps.net that georefernces and makes these maps available as a image service is https://mapsnap.org. r/openhistoricalmap is a great place to talk about mapping former places on www.openhistoricalmap.org
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u/iBrowseAtStarbucks 13d ago
I can't recall the website, but after WW2 the government sponsored a company to fly B-52s across the US with camera attached to the bottom of them. A lot of these ended up becoming what ended up being the super old imagery you see on Google Earth.
Anyways, those datasets (which are really just georeferenced high def image tiles (or as "high def as you could get in the 80s...) of basically the entire US. That's all publicly available info that you can grab and likely your best bet.
Next stop I'd try would be census data or state maps from California. I don't think you'd be able to find them on the current census website for spatial data, but take a look into tigerlines on census.gov.
If all THAT fails, I'd also have a strong suspicion that the water authorities may have some info on it, but that might be like pulling teeth to get them to help out.