Period maps

The maps

Charleston and its harbor as they were drawn — before the war, during it, and just after. Catalogued, never colorized.

17maps cataloged
11made during the war
13free to reuse
4permission required

How this catalog works

No map is copied onto this site. Each record carries the holding institution’s own title, date, medium, scale and call number, its rights statement word for word, and a link to the catalog entry — where the sheet can be read at full resolution in a viewer built for maps. A map shrunk to fit a web page is not a map; it is a picture of one.

Hosting is not owning. The Library of Congress serves images it does not own. Robert Knox Sneden’s Charleston maps are on loc.gov and belong to the Virginia Historical Society, and permission comes from Richmond. Every record here names the holder separately from the repository serving the image.

What no map here can do. None of them converts a wartime street number into a modern address. Charleston renumbered the whole city under a contract of 1882, finished before the earthquake of 31 August 1886, and the earliest sheets that show numbers at all — the Sanborn surveys of 1884 and 1888 — are already on the far side of that change. This is why the galleries on the studio map are pinned to a stretch of street rather than to a building.

Before the war

The city and the harbor as they stood when the photographers arrived, and as the Confederacy inherited them.

1861–1865

What the two sides, and the newspaper-reading public, understood the defences of Charleston to be.

After the war

Later sheets, listed as later. They are here because of what they show of the wartime city — and, in the case of the fire insurance maps, because of what they cannot show.