Seeing old highway maps from the 1960s that put cities in the wrong spots

My dad had this old gas station map from 1965 that showed a whole town in Kansas shifted about 20 miles west of where it actually sits. I drove out there last summer and found nothing but a wheat field where the map said the town center should be. How do mistakes that obvious even make it onto a printed map that people actually relied on?

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2 Comments

the_joel3d agoMost Upvoted

The part about "how do mistakes that obvious even make it onto a printed map" gets me every time. I had a 1970s roadmap of Colorado that put a whole mountain pass about 15 miles south of where it actually is. Drove my truck down a dirt road looking for it and ended up stuck in a ravine for two hours. Turns out the map company just copied the data from an even older map that had the mistake printed from a surveyor's error back in the 1800s. They never actually went out and checked. I bet that Kansas town was the same thing some clerk in an office just traced a line from a previous map without questioning it. People really did rely on those things and they were full of these hidden errors.

baker.phoenix2d ago

My granddad had a similar issue with a 1950s map of Texas that showed a lake that didn't exist. He spent a whole afternoon driving around looking for it with my uncle. They ended up at some farmer's property who laughed and said people showed up every few years asking about it.