1897 Grayson County Map

Description

Click the images to see the map and a cropped, full resolution portion of the map.

Some Background

Late in 1896 Grayson County commissioned a report on the “Material Resources of Grayson County.” The purpose of this report was to promote those resources to outside developers. The report, done by the state geologist C.R. Boyd, included the map shown above and an accompanying booklet. The map is generally referred to as the 1897 Grayson Map.

Boyd’s report showed where gold, iron, and forests are in Grayson. His map can also be a gold mine for Grayson Co. genealogists. To help potential developers acquire land or mining rights, the map shows the names and locations of major land owners in the county. 

This map can help answer the question: “Where did my ancestors live?” If you are a direct descendant of some of these 1897 land owners then you can see the locations of their homes on this map. If your family left Grayson before 1897 it’s possible that your cousins are shown and those cousins were still on the land that your common ancestors owned. If your ancestor isn’t on the map, but is in the census, then you might find someone on the map that lived a couple of houses away. 

The 1897 Grayson Map has been available for purchase in Grayson County for a long time. However, the printed copies are copies of copies and the small printing and slightly blurred lines make it difficult to read. A member of the GCVHF found a scan of an original version of this map and gave us a copy of that image. Although it was much sharper the image did have problems. 

Cleaning up the map

The scanned image we received had two halves of the map joined in one image. They didn’t quite fit. They were slightly different sizes and there was a gap between the two halves. One of our members volunteered to stitch them together, and he did more than that, as he described his work:

I figured that the reason to make this updated version was to be able to read as much of the information as possible, so getting the text clearly visible/readable took priority. That did mean erasing pieces of some lines in order to create a space around the text labels. 

Here is a list of edits made, which I believe make the new map a LOT more readable, and thus useful to researchers. 

• Conversion of color (black on brown) to grayscale
• Adjust contrast, brightness, mid-tones to make the map as dark as possible, without adding shadows/halos
• Stretched/manipulated small areas at a time to stitch the two halves of the map together.
• Removed all fold marks and cleared up any “fuzzy” text and lines that ran through the folds and creases.
• Created a “label window” around any text where rivers, creeks, roads, quasi-contours, geologic symbols, and other misc lines/symbols overlaid a text label, making it very difficult to read. In doing so, I enhanced any letters that were revealed to ensure readability. Any text labels that were undecipherable or overlapped other text, were left as-is. Used info from New River Notes, Census, USGS to help figure out the text.
• Darkened any lines/text where the map was faded.
• Where text was filled, such as the center of “o”, “R”, etc, I tried to create some whitespace in the middle of the letter to make it more readable.

This map is approximately 30″ x 19″ map and shows many land owners, place names, roads, water ways, mountains, and resources of 1897 Grayson County.