Thamesville 1925 Survey Map

Way back when—during a highschool history project—I was loaned a copy of a 1925 surveyor’s map of Thamesville, Ontario. It compromised of about 3’x4’ map segemtns. Many townfolk had taken care to annotate the map with notes about the land, the buildings, and the people who lived there. It seems like a such a weird, hyper-local piece of history so… I digitized it!

The map was already a copy of a copy so the quality was slightly degraded. I photographed it in sections, stitched into a single high-resolution mosaic, and sliced into tiles so it can be explored in a browser.

Scroll to zoom · drag to pan.

Map Image Data

I digitized it in 2012, so the exact details are a little hazy, but I believe the process went something like this:

• 89 images from a 15 MP dSLR
• Each stitched mosaic — including stitching and masking data — is ~1.5 GB
• ~800 MB of 256×256 tiles
• A compressed JPEG of the full map is ~50 MB

The image collection

Because the source material is large, direct downloads aren’t offered. I may not even have the paper copies anymore and I’ll have to go spelunking for the raw image data. But… for research or historical use, get in touch and I’ll see what I can do.