New Map Collaboration Helps Tell Story of Durham's History

A Duke-Durham collaboration that merges Google Earth technology with historic city maps offers a new online resource for educators, historians and the Durham community.

The Digital Durham Web site (http://digitaldurham.duke.edu/) -- which includes U.S. Census data, photographs, personal and public records dating back to post-Civil War Durham -- recently added more than 30 newly digitized maps from the city Department of Public Works and university libraries, including two integrated with Google Earth satellite images of present-day Durham.

"With this new virtual collection, we're enabling people to travel through time to see what Durham looked like, and to connect past and present," said Duke historian Trudi Abel, who worked with city officials to make the maps publicly available for the first time. "These maps tell all kinds of stories. There's an amazing amount of detail packed into them."

One hand-drawn map depicts Durham as a village in the 1860s; later maps illustrate growing roadways, sewer systems and city infrastructure. The collection includes a 1937 Public Works map demarcating "white" and "Negro" streets and playgrounds, a Cold War-era map with annotations predicting potential damage from a nuclear bomb and a hand-colored annexation map showing Durham's growth from 1890 to 2001.

The city now uses a geographic information system (GIS) for mapping, but city GIS analyst George Locke admits a fondness for the old hand-drawn maps, which engineers still use on occasion to field maintenance requests for the city's water and sewer systems.

"Mapmaking before the computer age was an art form," Locke said. "And those maps still contain valuable information."

He pulled together about a dozen maps for Abel from cabinets and closets where they'd been squirreled away - -- and even rescued a few from the trash. Some he rejected as too tattered or fragile to scan; others were so large they had to be cut in half to fit through the scanner.

City officials were eager to make the maps available to the public online, said David Cates, Public Works' GIS administrator. "A lot of people are deeply interested in how Durham grew as a city, and these maps are all clues as to how that occurred, in fits and starts."

Local preservation designer Sara Davis Lachenman said the Digital Durham site already has proved an invaluable resource in her work restoring and remodeling houses in the downtown area.

"Using these maps, I can trace the history of a particular neighborhood or street," Lachenman said. "I'm picky about making sure the architectural details are accurate -- the moldings and porch posts, the windows. If I can get a context of the era (when a house was built), I have a much better idea of what kind of period-appropriate details to put back. And being able to dig through that history online is really wonderful."

Juxtaposing the historic maps with Google Earth also helps bring local history to life for students who otherwise might not appreciate Durham's importance as an industrializing city in the post-Civil War New South, said Duke junior Courtney Jamison.

"Students don't realize how much history is here," said Jamison, an international comparative studies major who used the maps to research a paper for Abel about the James A. Whitted School, Durham's first African-American graded school. "With the Google Earth technology, you can really see how the history relates to you -- it's eye-opening."

Abel hopes to secure funding for the next step: working with visualization experts at Duke to integrate Durham city directory data from the Internet Archives -- including residents' race, occupation and address -- to construct an interactive three-dimensional map of Durham's population patterns over time.

"This new virtual collection of maps gives people a way to visualize and explore big ideas like industrialization, immigration and segregation -- to see how they take place through time," she said.

The site also includes maps from Duke's Rare Book, Manuscript and Special Collections Library and University Archives, as well as the North Carolina Collection at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, The site was built with support from the State Library of North Carolina and a variety of Duke sources, including the Center for Instructional Technology, University Librarian, Vice Provost of Undergraduate Education, Office of Community Affairs, Department of History and Master of Arts in Liberal Studies Program.