We can see the Caroline County landscape in 1897, thanks to the efforts of two county citizens working 72 years apart.

I found no reference to M. L. Saulsbury’s mapmaking in the Denton Journal around 1897.  So I’m not sure why this map was made.  And I haven’t seen an original version.  So, our thanks to G. H. Fooks for tracing and “certifying” a copy of the original 72 years later, in 1969.  One might guess the copy was “certified” as authoritative for real estate tax, inheritance, or land ownership issues.

The map shows the owner’s name for many farm and town residences and businesses.  And the locations of roads, grist mills, sawmills, stables, and churches across the entire county.

A tattered copy of the very large 1897 was in the collection of Caroline County Library’s main branch at Denton in 2010 when I started working to digitize and publish this in a web map.  I scanned the paper map on my small home scanner and published the digital map in two sections, north and south.

Thanks to David Baker, president of the Upper Shore Genealogical Society of Maryland, who provided large format digital copies of the 1897 map in summer 2022.  According to David, the county commissioners had the map re-created in 1969, and some were for sale at the county zoning office many years ago. He obtained a copy and had it professionally scanned and converted to a digital form, so that it could be shared for genealogy or historical research.   I geo-rectified David’s image file (stretched it over the modern digital map) and published a new and better map layer.

Lots of ways to revisit 1897

File Downloads

You can download PDF (5 MB) and PNG (43 MB) versions of the map.

 

Interactive Map Apps

Simple Map Viewer – Turn the 1897 layer on/off, change the transparency/opacity, change the basemap.

Compare 1897 to Satellite Imagery – Or change the basemap to streets, topography, night view.

Family Names Search – 1897 – Search, select, zoom automatically to the one-mile section where the name appears.

Heritage Sites Research Map – See Caroline County Historical Society, Maryland Historical Trust, USGS, and other sites and names over historical basemaps.

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