A Map of Notable Post-industrial and Other Anachronistic Places
Data updated 5/31/2017
This is a map of locations culled from my research, reading and travel. Most of these places have some significance in the history of industrial production in the United States. Many are adaptive reuse projects. Others are structures that have been abandoned or are in ruins. Some others have been preserved on the merits of historic significance. Many of the points on this map don’t have anything to do with the industrial history of the US. They are places I think are interesting for one reason or another. The locations of most of the extant 19th century Kirkbride style asylums are marked here, for example. I have a fascination with underutilized central business districts and have marked the locations of many main street shopping districts. Many company towns are also marked. Where possible, I have included information about the product produced at industrial locations. A search for “shoes” then will show the broad outline of the historic geography of shoe production in the US. The industry was centered in eastern Massachusetts in the 19th century and then largely dispersed or moved to Missouri in the 20th. I hope to add filtering by year to this map soon. I’m not sure who, if anyone, will use this map or why. So I wasn’t sure how to organize its presentation of data. People interested in the ruins of deindustrialization might find it useful. People interested in ghost towns or general industrial history might use it for travel destination ideas. I have not personally been to many of the locations on this map and for many I have no idea as to access or current conditions. I’ve put a link to Google maps in the pop-ups that appear when points are clicked. The Google maps can be used to find directions and have recent satellite imagery of the sites. I will be occasionally improving this map and updating its database.
This is my first webmap. Hopefully there will be many more in the future. The data comes from a geodatabase I've been compiling in ESRI's ArcMap. Many of the fields are useful for sorting places in ArcMap but maybe not so useful in this format. I used Openlayers 3 for the interactive features on this map. The background is provided by Open Street Map. This is a hobby. The advertising on the website barely pays for its hosting. But I do like getting comments and suggestions. I was thinking that in some distant future I’d like to add a crowd sourced element to this map and database. I still hardly know Javascript and the web technology it would take to pull that off so it won’t happen anytime soon. You can email me at hedlunch@yahoo.com
All content on these pages Copyright Mark Hedlund 2012-2019. All rights reserved. Use in school projects and with links on social media is always okay. Please send me an email to request permission for any other use: hedlunch@yahoo.com Non-exclusive commercial publication rights for most photos is $25 per image.