Historical C’ville Maps

The U.Va library’s Geostat Center makes available maps of Charlottesville from 1907 and 1920, and they’re pretty great. The detail and level of description is what really makes it. The room-by-room rendering of the Woolen Mills’ Pantop Academy, for instance, notes that there are night and Sunday watchmen, that it’s heated by steam fueled with coal, and that there’s a 20,000 gallon water tank. Businesses’ names aren’t given but, instead, they’re described. Downtown, Sal’s was a barbershop, CVS was a telegraphy shop, the corner of 3rd SE and Water was a carriage shop and a wheelwright, the Jefferson Theater was the Jefferson Theater (“moving pictures”) and Timberlake’s was Timberlake’s. (Not everything has changed.) All are accompanied by metadata so they can be loaded into mapping software, for that extra touch of awesomeness.

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