Then and now

I’ve got several stories I’ve been noodling around with, finding out where they are going to take me and trying to shape them into more than just a list of interesting factoids.

Part of that process has led me to seek out old maps of Lawrence to get a better sense of what was here, how past leaders and developers expected Lawrence to expand, etc. One great resource has been the Lawrence Library’s Helen Osma Local History Collection, with a number of local histories, directories, and maps. My favorite, stored in the flat files, is the 1902 survey of Douglas County.

It’s a detailed survey of the commercial/legal land descriptions of the entire county, every parcel, every township, every city (including some that weren’t much more than the fevered hopes of a few native son town-boosters). The biggest map is for Lawrence, which covers several folios (and has the original names of Lawrence’s now-numbered East-West streets).

One thing to note is that it is a document intended to show where legal property lines are. The streets look enormous because they reflect the easement all the way to individual property lots. (If you live in the older neighborhoods in Lawrence and have had your property lines marked, this is why “your” yard only stretches a few feet from your porch.) It’s also important to note that the city was nowhere near this big in 1902: while the land had been divided and platted, most of the lots shown on the map had no homes or businesses yet. Twenty years after the publication of this map, according to the 1922 School Survey of Lawrence, Kansas, “It is an interesting fact that Lawrence is only about 50% occupied. Not more than one-half of all the lots in the city are occupied.”

Still, the property boundaries are accurate, and certain landmarks such as the railroads, the river and dam very accurately placed, so I wanted to create a then and now photo slider with a current aerial map to really highlight the changes.

Detail of the downtown area:

You’ll note on the downtown map that the biggest difference is the river channel shifting east - based on the 1902 location it is easy to see how there was once a “swimming beach” near 5th and Tennessee. Despite the massive flood that was to come only a later, you can see that the area immediately east of the north end of the bridge had been lost to the river sometime prior, while later maps and aerial photography show the river basin northwest of downtown didn’t shift eastward until after a flood in 1935 at the earliest. 

The scans I made of the original folios are fairly high resolution (300 dpi) and the assembled map is more than 10,000 pixels wide. There are still a few gaps due to scanning issues I had, and I did some very minor work in photoshop to match edges, especially between separate pages. If anyone would like a copy of the original hi-res scans, please feel free to contact me.