Now's your chance to see a collection of almost 400 historic maps dating back to the Civil War, including one that shows where the slave population was heaviest.
The maps were digitally compiled by the Office of Coast Survey, a sister agency with the high-tech National Hurricane Center in Miami-Dade County. Both fall under the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
"It is unusual," Dawn Forsythe, a Coast Survey project manager, said of her agency's task to archive old maps. "But we're doing the same basic tasks that we were given when we were founded in 1807, and that is to make navigation safe."
The office, which has its headquarters in Silver Spring, Md., was the U.S. government's first scientific agency, founded by President Thomas Jefferson in 1807. It's mission then, as today, was to draw maps of the waters around the U.S. shoreline to determine where there might be navigational hazards.
"More ships were going down by accident than by war, so we needed to develop some maps and charts of the coast," Forsythe said.
Since its inception, the agency has amassed about 35,000 maps. During the Civil War, the maps were used to help the Union's military campaigns. Perhaps the most historic one shows how the slave population was distributed in the South. It was used by President Abraham Lincoln to develop a strategy against the Confederacy.
"The map was among the first to use shading to represent the human population," said Albert Theberge, a NOAA librarian.
Recently, Coast Survey released its Civil War-era maps under a digital collection titled, "Charting a more perfect union." To see it, go to http://www.nauticalcharts.noaa.gov/history/CivilWar/.