The Trail System of the Southeastern United States in the Early Colonial Period (W. E. Myer, 1923, published 1928)

William E. Myer's preliminary map of the trail network of the colonial-era Southeast, compiled for the Bureau of American Ethnology from early maps, land records and field work: over 125 numbered trails, historic towns and sites from the Ohio River to the Gulf and from the Mississippi to the Atlantic. Georeferenced to thirty modern city locations.

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Source

MapThe Trail System of the Southeastern United States in the Early Colonial Period
AuthorWilliam Edward Myer, 1928
Archive42nd Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology (Smithsonian Institution, GPO); scan via Yale Beinecke Library / Wikimedia Commons · about 1:5,000,000 (plate 15)
RightsPublic domain. A United States federal publication (Bureau of American Ethnology annual report, Government Printing Office, 1928): public domain both as a U.S. government work and as a pre-1931 publication. Evidence
AccuracyAbout 10 km (RMS 6.3 km at 30 control points). At 1:5M the drawn trail width itself spans several kilometres. Read the overlay as which river valley and which gap, never which ridge. West Virginia and Louisiana are covered only in part; the sheet fades out at the Ohio River and the Mississippi delta.
MethodThird-order polynomial fit of thirty modern city locations to the plate's city symbols (symbols detected automatically, matched by graduated tolerance); the plate is a small-scale polyconic sheet, so trails are corridors, not surveyed lines. See the methodology.
Version1.0.0, updated 2026-09-17
CoversTennessee, Kentucky, Virginia, West Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Florida, Louisiana

Changelog

  • 1.0.0 (2026-09-17): First release: 30 control points, tinted and scan layers, z4–z10.

Control points

The full list of control points with residuals is in control-points.geojson. Historic names indexed for search: names.geojson.

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