Found a lost town by checking old railroad maps

I've been trying to find a place called 'Cedar Switch' that shows up on an 1870s map of Ohio but nothing modern. After months of looking at plat books and census records I got nowhere. Then I dug up a old railroad atlas from 1885 at the library and saw a tiny depot marker right where the map said Cedar Switch was. Turns out the town was just a loading station that got abandoned when the tracks moved in 1902. Has anyone else had luck using railroad maps instead of regular land surveys?

2 comments

2 Comments

oliviapatel1mo ago

Well that's just typical... I spent three weekends digging through dusty land records and all I needed was a train nerd's old map collection. Sounds like Cedar Switch went the way of most things that depend on railroads, just poof gone when the tracks got bored and wandered off. At least you found it though, beats my luck with a similar ghost town near me that I'm pretty sure only existed in some surveyor's imagination.

lee.casey1mo ago

Yeah, have you tried looking at the old Sanborn fire insurance maps? They show every single building and what it was made of... I found a whole forgotten mill town near the river by cross-referencing those with an 1890s railroad map. The fire maps had the original street names and property lines that didn't match anything current. Also check the state historical society's online collections, a lot of them have digitized the railroad right-of-way maps that show depots and sidings even the train guys forgot about. That's how I tracked down a whistle stop called "Parkers Corner" that only had about three houses and a grain elevator.