About
About this map
This is the Atlanta map of History Underfoot: a free history map of the City of Atlanta and DeKalb County. Pick a mode, tap anywhere, and it tells you what is under your feet, with the sources for every claim.
Four ways to read the ground
- Water. Lakes and ponds with their histories, the creeks that were buried in pipes, the dams, and the watersheds they drain to.
- Civil War. The 1864 campaign day by day: the lines, marches and battles, drawn on today's streets.
- Segregation. How the color line was drawn and redrawn, from the 1938 redlining map through the 2020 census.
- Early. The land before the city: trails, the 1821 land lots, the first city limits, and the Creek and Cherokee history the public record holds.
The Here tab gathers what all four modes know about any spot you tap. The Ask tab answers questions from the map's own records.
Watermarks
Watermarks brings back 22 lakes that drained, broke their dams or were filled in. 14 are refilled from the county's lidar, where the old lakebed is still in the ground; 8 are traced from aerial photos because the basin is gone. Each one links to a full history, and the map lets you fill it back up and scrub through the aerial photos year by year.
Who made it
History Underfoot is made by Daniel. It is free, carries no ads and sells nothing. Atlanta is its first place.
History clubs can ask for a members-only edition. It adds research layers that are not suitable for a public map, and members agree to the dig rules that come with them.
Historical societies and history groups: History Underfoot is starting a coalition to help keep local history online and findable. See what it offers.
How AI was used
This project leans on AI, and says so on every page.
- Research. AI research agents searched public sources (encyclopedias, National Register nominations, historical markers, newspapers, court opinions and published scholarship) and drafted each entry with its citations.
- Checking. A second AI pass checked 4,167 individual claims against their cited sources and corrected 1,211 of them before anything was published. Entries keep "likely" and "uncertain" labels where the sources are thin.
- Aerial photos and lidar. AI agents read each lake's aerial photos from 1940 to 2026 and the county lidar, and a second agent checked every reading against the images. The Watermarks shorelines are computed from the elevation data or traced from a dated photo, and each one was checked against that photo.
- The Ask guide. Answers are written by Claude, an AI model made by Anthropic. It is told to answer from the map's records first and to say when it is unsure. It can still be wrong, so check its answers against the records it names.
- What stays out. Locations of archaeological sites and graves are never shown, and the public map gives no guidance on digging or collecting. Those were decisions, not accidents.
There will still be mistakes. When you find one, tell us and it gets fixed.
Corrections and contributions
Write to hello@historyunderfoot.org. Family papers, old photos, deeds and plats settle many of the open questions listed on each lake page. If you send a document, say whether it can be credited to you by name.
Credits
The map is built on public data and on the work of libraries and archives, among them Georgia State University Library, Emory's Center for Digital Scholarship, the University of Richmond's Mapping Inequality project, the U.S. Geological Survey, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the USDA, the Census Bureau, and the City of Atlanta, DeKalb County and Fulton County GIS offices. The Methods page lists every source and its license.