Tap the mapfor what’s known about any spot
The City of Atlanta and DeKalb County, layer by layer. Pick a mode, then tap anywhere to see what’s under it.
History Underfoot’s Atlanta map covers the City of Atlanta and DeKalb County in four modes: Water, Civil War, Segregation and Early (before 1861). The Here tab in every mode gathers what all four know about any spot you tap. Every place entry carries its sources and says when a location is approximate or the sources disagree. Corrections are welcome.
Lakes are the 83 dams of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ National Inventory of Dams in and around the city and county, matched to lake outlines from USGS hydrography. Average depth is the inventory’s normal storage divided by its surface area, so treat it as a rough figure; the inventory’s “year completed” is often a rebuild or survey date. Streams are the USGS high-resolution stream network. The buried and piped streams are modeled: the USGS lidar was resampled to 10 m, its pits and depressions filled, and every cell routed downhill (the pysheds library) to trace the paths water takes. Paths draining more than 0.2 km² that no mapped stream follows are shown as buried or piped where the ground around them is at least 20% paved or built (NLCD 2021), and as small unmapped channels elsewhere. Road fills and culverts bend the model, so a line marks the valley, not the exact pipe; compare it with the 1890s USGS map. Watersheds and divides are from the USGS Watershed Boundary Dataset.
The historic maps are the City of Atlanta’s and the Atlanta Regional Commission’s own, from Georgia State University Library’s Planning Atlanta collection (shown for personal, educational and non-commercial use, as the library’s license allows). The 1938 grades as shapes are from Mapping Inequality (Nelson, Winling et al., University of Richmond; CC BY-NC-SA 4.0). The 2000, 2010 and 2020 figures are computed from the Census Bureau’s redistricting files (P.L. 94-171) for each census’s own tracts; “Black” means Black or African American alone. Atlanta’s annexations are from the city’s records. Words like “Negro” appear because they are the maps’ own titles.
Land lots and districts are from DeKalb and Fulton County GIS, which still use the 1821 survey. Trails are generalized: they are drawn along the modern roads that sources say follow them and should be read as corridors, not paths. The first city limits come from the city’s annexation records; the 1853 map is Vincent’s subdivision map, georeferenced by GSU Library; the 1890s map is the USGS Atlanta and Marietta sheets (USGS historical topographic map collection).
The water, segregation, early and Civil War entries were compiled in September 2026 from the New Georgia Encyclopedia, the Atlanta History Center, the DeKalb History Center, National Register nominations, Georgia Historical Society and Historical Marker Database markers, the Official Records, National Park Service battle summaries, court opinions and published scholarship, each cited with its item. The same review corrected the Civil War text: the ordnance train (about 80 cars and five locomotives, 28 with ammunition), Utoy Creek and Ezra Church losses, Logan’s XV Corps, the length of the outer line, the burning’s dates and extent, and Oakland’s acreage.
The aerials for 1940 through 2013 and the 1921, 1938 and 1950s maps come from Georgia State University Library’s map server (the Sprawling of Atlanta mosaics, the 1949 Aerial Survey of Atlanta and the Planning Atlanta collections). The 2023 aerial is USDA NAIP. Everything was reprojected to one grid, so the layers line up to within a few meters; the oldest mosaics are less exact at their edges.
Detail depends on where you are. Across the city and county the 1940, 1955, 1968, 1993 and 2023 aerials, the lidar and the three maps are at 5 m per pixel, and 1949, 1972, 1981, 2005 and 2013 at 10 m. The Peachtree Creek, Ezra Church, Utoy Creek, Decatur, inner-line and Stone Mountain areas have 2 m versions of the early years and the lidar; East Atlanta has 1.25 m; the lake has the county’s own aerials at well under a meter. The 1940 mosaic has missing frames in DeKalb, and the 1949 survey and the maps cover only the city of their day.
The county-wide ground model is USGS 3DEP lidar; East Atlanta and the lake use DeKalb County’s 2024 lidar. The shaded view lights the bare earth from the northwest. The micro-relief view subtracts a smoothed surface so only small bumps and dips remain, which is where old grades, pits, dams and ditches show.
Lines come from the Georgia Historical Commission markers Wilbur Kurtz wrote in 1956, the Official Records (vol. 38), the National Park Service battlefield survey and, for the Confederate inner line, Emory’s ATLMaps fortifications layer. They’re drawn on today’s streets where the sources name the roads; between documented points they’re inferred, and each popup gives its confidence. Marches are routed along today’s roads and railroads along today’s tracks, which follow the 1864 ones only roughly.
The zones are a model, not a survey. Each fight, march or camp spreads debris by simple rules:
Each zone is then discounted for ground that’s been dug or paved: interstates, ramps, quarries and landfills count as destroyed; streets, rail lines and densely built ground (from the 2021 national impervious-surface map) as heavily disturbed. Parks, cemeteries, state land and the prison farm are cut out entirely, because digging there is illegal. Relic hunters have also worked Atlanta since the 1960s. A high tier means a better chance than elsewhere on this map, not that anything is still there.
There is no layer of probable Native sites. Georgia keeps archaeological site locations confidential because published locations get looted and many sites include graves, and a predictive map would amount to the same thing. The Story tab covers what the public record says.
Depths shallower than about 8½ ft are measured from DeKalb County’s 2024 lidar, flown during the drawdown; the basin below that is projected from the edge of the lidar, the pool left when the lake was drained, the creek channel seen in the drained-lake photo, the dam’s slope and the dam inventory’s 30-ft height. The three cases bracket what isn’t known. Stone features A and B were reported as stone-built during a site visit on Sept. 28, 2026; C comes from a single low-water photo and isn’t confirmed from a second source.