Currently, this collection from Google Earth Library has over 2,000 historic USGS Topographic maps covering several areas of the United States.  The maps are available in various scales and date back as early as the 1800s in many areas.

Instructions:

First, click on the button below to load the indices into Google Earth.

Just click on one of the indexes, find the area you are interested in, click on the placemark in the center of the outlined area, then click on blue hyper link for the map year you want to view.  The maps will appear under Temporary Places.   You can delete them from there when you’re done.

Original Data From:

I have converted the maps for Google Earth, but I did not scan any of these maps.  They were obtained them from many different sources including:

• University of Nevada Reno Mary B Ansari Map Library
• California State University, Chico Meriam Library
• University of California Berkeley Earth Sciences & Map Library and here and here.
• USGS Bay Area Regional Database
• University of California Santa Barbaray Alexandria Digital Library
• Fort Lewis College Center of Southwest Studies
• University of New Hampshire Government Information Department
• Maptech.com
• North Carolina State University GIS Data Services
• University of Washington – Early Washington Maps
• NOAA Historical Map & Chart Project
• New Jersey Geological Survey
• USGS Gulf Coast Historic Topographic Maps
• Pennsylvania Spacial Data Access
• Delaware Geological Survey
• SDAG Historic Topographic Maps of San Diego County
• Historic Topographic Maps 1:250,000, University of Texas Austin.
• University of Hawaii Manoa Library

I would like to thank the above sources for making their collections available to the public for download.  Historic topographic maps are a valuable public resource and it’s good to see libraries acting in the best interest of the public by making the maps available to the public.  Below are several more great online historic topographic map collections.

• Univeristy of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
• University of Tennessee Map Library
• University of Alabama (Click on a State then look for link to Out-of-Print Quadrangles at the top of the page)
• Broer Map Library
• Florida State University Visual Collections (Search for Topographic)
• University of Connecticut USGS Topographic Map Mosaics
• University of Chicago Library