Finding maps in the archive

The archive holds maps in five different senses of the word, and they answer different questions. A sea chart will not tell you who owned a forty; a plat will not tell you where the shoal is. This page is a finding aid: what is here, what each family is good for, and where it will mislead you.

Counts were taken on 8 August 2026 and will drift as retrieval continues.

Start here

• Want the data, not a picture? The GIS package carries every layer the archive may redistribute as a GeoPackage, QGIS project, Esri File Geodatabase and KMZ, with the island’s bare-earth LiDAR at its full one-metre resolution.
• Want a map to look at? The atlas holds the archive’s own plates — 59 of them as articles, six themes across ten islands.
• Want a specific historical sheet? Work down this page by family.

The archive’s own cartography

Fifty-nine atlas plates, drawn from the retrieved layers rather than copied from anyone: access, ecology, environment, geology, hydrology and maritime context, repeated across Beaver, Garden, High, Hog, North and South Fox, Whiskey and the archipelago as a whole, plus four quadrant sheets each for environment and land survey on Big Beaver. Being derived, they are the one family here the archive can license openly.

The terrain products sit beside them: a bare-earth digital elevation model at 1 m and 2 m, matching hillshades, and 16,235 contour lines at a 2 m interval, all from the 2018 USGS 3DEP survey.

Sea charts — 156 articles, 1755 to 2024

The largest single family, and the deepest in time. The distribution is not even: 2 sheets before 1800, 8 across the nineteenth century, then 30 in 1900–1924, 38 in 1925–1949, 35 in 1950–1974, 30 in 1975–1999 and 13 since 2000.

Charts are the best record of the water and a poor record of the land. They are also the family most likely to disagree with each other about names — see Historical toponymy and map change for why that is a finding rather than an error, and Charting and survey for how the surveys were made.

The early cartography is catalogued individually: Coronelli (1688), Franquelin (1688), Delisle (1703), Bellin (1744), Bellin–Homann, Mitchell and d’Anville (all 1755), Carver (1778), and John Farmer’s Michigan of 1853 and 1866.

Topographic sheets

Twenty-two historical quadrangles and eleven current ones. The historical run covers the 1:62,500 Beaver Island of 1956, the 1:24,000 Beaver Island North and South provisional editions of 1986, 1:100,000 sheets of 1984, and neighbouring Garden, Hog and Gull Island sheets.

These are more useful than they look. Every sheet is a GeoPDF carrying its own georeferencing in the page’s LGIDict — projection, datum and a transform from PDF points to projected metres. That means a 1986 sheet can be laid under modern LiDAR without hand-picking control points. Two cautions: the datum is NAD27, so expect a 10–25 m offset against modern data, and GDAL builds without the PDF driver cannot read the dictionary at all.

Land survey and plats

The federal survey is held as General Land Office plats, tract books and survey notes, alongside the BLM’s modern PLSS grid — the join key that ties an 1850s-surveyed forty to a modern parcel.

County plat books are held for 1901, the 1930s, and a 1929–1955 run, with the island sheets catalogued individually: Plat of Big Beaver Island, 1901, Plat of the north end of Beaver Island, 1930s, Plat of the south end of Beaver Island, 1930s, Plat of Garden Island, 1930s and Plats of the outer Beaver Islands, 1930s.

Plats answer ownership and section geometry. They are not survey-accurate for anything else, and a plat book’s roads are schematic.

Trails and recreation

Twenty documents are held from Peaine Township’s trail sources, retrieved in August 2026. Eighteen are the documents in the township’s current document centre: the island-wide trail map, a version annotated with trailheads, the Ed Leuck trail narrative, a Beaver Island Birding Trail guide, the Water Trail plan and paddling guide, the state-forest ORV road list, four CMU GPS regional trail maps of 2008, and all seven Beaver Island Trail Association per-trail sheets of July 2019 — Blue, North Lake/Buffalo’s Camp, Middie Perron’s, Greene’s/Martin, Greene’s/Martin to Camp 3, Camp 3 to French Bay, and 7 Bridges/Hannigan’s. The two additional held documents are the Michigan State University trails master plan and the later Peaine Parks and Recreation Plan draft.

The 2019 Blue Trail sheet is the one that settles the question people usually ask about the south end: a complete loop using the Blue Trail, Buffalo’s Camp Trail and East Side Drive/South End Road is 7.5 miles. See Blue Trail and Buffalo’s Camp Trail. Earlier trail cartography is held too, including St. James Township Trail Master Plan map, 2002.

A trail map is a drawing, not a survey. The trail association’s own sheets say so: “prepared as an imperfect visual guide … should not be relied upon for complete accuracy.” Several of these trails are wetter and less distinct on the ground than any sheet suggests.

Held, but not republished

Some maps are here for research and citation and may not be reproduced. The most often requested is Beaver Island History Map, 1978 revision — the Beaver Island Historical Society’s map, still under copyright. The archive holds it, cites it, and will not serve an image of it. Its record links to the original instead.

Every asset in the archive is gated by a deny-by-default rights ledger, so “we hold it” and “you may republish it” are separate questions, always.

Known gaps

Recorded here so nobody re-chases them:

• The Peaine Recreation Plan 2019–2024 is still indexed by search engines at a host that no longer serves it. The 2023 Park and Recreation Plan draft is held instead — a different document.
• The Michigan DNR’s management plan for state-owned lands on the northern Lake Michigan islands returns 403 to the archive’s user agent on both its legacy and current paths. Blocked, not absent.

Two of these were discovered because a knowledge-base citation pointed at a municipal CMS that had moved hosts twice. Anything cited only by URL is one migration away from being uncitable, which is why the archive holds local copies of what it cites and sweeps for citations that lack one.

Practical notes

• Storage is EPSG:4326; calculation is EPSG:3078 (Michigan GeoRef, metres); tiled plotting is EPSG:3857. The published rasters are EPSG:3078.
• When citing a page from a bound volume, say whether it is a PDF page or a printed folio. Two sources here have offsets large enough to send a reader to the wrong page entirely.
• OpenStreetMap layers are ODbL 1.0 and attribution is a licence condition, not a courtesy. USGS, BLM, NOAA, NPS and Census products are public domain.

Added 8 August 2026. Recent changes