Took me 3 years to realize a 1960s road atlas had a entire county in the wrong place

I picked up a 1963 Shell road atlas at a garage sale for 50 cents and kept using it for backroads trips around Indiana. I spent two whole afternoons trying to find a town called 'Romney' in Tippecanoe County that just didn't exist on modern maps. Finally I checked the county borders against a 2020 map and realized they drew the entire county line about 10 miles off to the west. Has anyone else found a map with a border that's just plain wrong like that?

2 comments

2 Comments

ryanburns4d ago

Read a piece a while back about how old maps had all sorts of errors because surveyors just didn't have the same tools. They'd use township and range lines from the 1800s that were sometimes drawn wrong on purpose to keep settlers out of certain areas. Your Romney situation sounds like the mapmakers just shifted a whole grid square over, maybe from a bad base map. Have seen similar stories where old highway maps would show a road going straight through a lake just because nobody had bothered to update the shape of the shoreline since the 30s.

the_robert3d ago

And that Romney thing you mentioned @ryanburns, that reminds me of the time I found a 1974 Indiana map that showed a whole stretch of the Wabash River completely wrong. The river was drawn like it cut through what should have been solid farmland. Spent a Saturday driving dirt roads looking for it, ended up in some guy's cornfield. He wasn't happy.