Just passed 300 old maps in my collection and one detail stood out

I hit 300 antique maps last weekend after picking up a 1720s county map of Kent at an estate sale for $40. What got me is how many of them show rivers and roads that don't exist anymore or have completely shifted course. One map from 1650 shows a whole village that must have been abandoned because I can't find any trace of it on modern records. Has anyone else noticed phantom towns on old maps that don't match up with current geography?

3 comments

3 Comments

torres.blair15d ago

Read somewhere that some of those ghost towns got wiped out by the plague and people just never went back. Kind of creepy to think a whole village just vanished like that.

troyknight15d ago

Wait, which plague though? The medieval Black Death or something more recent like the 1918 flu? I'm trying to picture people just packing up and never coming back because of one bad outbreak.

phoenix_martin4015d ago

Nah, I gotta disagree hard here. @troyknight, people absolutely abandoned towns over one outbreak. Look at Centralia, Pennsylvania - a whole town left because of a coal fire, not even a plague. The 1918 flu emptied out villages in Alaska and remote places where half the population died in weeks. They just locked the doors and walked. No one came back.