Map Showing Indian Trails and Towns in Ohio (William C. Mills, Archaeological Atlas of Ohio, 1914)
The statewide trails plate of William C. Mills' Archaeological Atlas of Ohio: the numbered trail network in red — the Great Trail, the Scioto Trail, the Warriors' Path — with the Native towns named in place: Pickawillany, Wapakoneta, Lower Shawnee Town, Coshocton, the Wyandot towns on the Sandusky, the Moravian Delaware towns on the Tuscarawas.
Source
| Map | Archaeological Atlas of Ohio, plate IX: Map Showing Indian Trails and Towns in Ohio |
|---|---|
| Author | William C. Mills, Ohio State Archaeological and Historical Society, 1914 |
| Archive | Internet Archive · about 1:1,200,000 |
| Rights | Public domain. Published 1914 — public domain by age. Internet Archive scan, no restrictions. Evidence |
| Accuracy | About 7 km (RMS 3.3 km at 17 control points). Mills compiled the trails from nineteenth-century county histories and the atlas county surveys; read the red lines as corridors a few kilometres wide, not surveyed centerlines. |
| Method | Second-order polynomial fit to seventeen towns and river mouths on the county grid. See the methodology. |
| Version | 1.0.2, updated 2026-10-09 |
| Covers | Ohio |
Downloads
- Google Earth overlay (KMZ) — free (4.1 MB)
- GeoTIFF, tinted trails, EPSG:4326 (2781 × 2344; QGIS, ArcGIS) — free (4.3 MB)
- Print sheet over today’s map (3600 × 2200 PNG) — free (5.5 MB)
Project Homeland
This map’s trails are traced into Project Homeland, one map of the trail network melded from every traced source, where they are compared with the other maps’ lines. Members can trace more of them: Trace a trail on the map.
Changelog
- 1.0.2 (2026-10-09): Place names restored to where they were before 1.0.1: on this map each name is placed at the place itself today, not where the old map draws it, so re-placing the map must not move them (1.0.1 moved them with the new fit by mistake). Tiles unchanged from 1.0.1.
- 1.0.1 (2026-10-08): Re-placed: fourteen control points re-read on their town symbols (many sat on the town’s name). Leave-one-out error 7.6 → 6.2 km; stated accuracy 6 → 7 km (it had been below the measured error). Place names moved with it (median 3.2 km).
- 1.0.0 (2026-09-25): First release: 17 control points, tinted and scan layers, z5–z11.
Credits
- Georeferencing: Native Routes
- Scan: Internet Archive
Control points
The full list of control points with residuals is in control-points.geojson. Historic names indexed for search: names.geojson.
Something on this map sits in the wrong place? Members can show where with Fix placement on the map — confirmed fixes are tested against the map’s other control points each night and credited here. For anything else, report a problem.
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