Hit 50 verified town names from old railway maps a week early

I've been going through a stack of 1890s railroad maps from the Midwest and cross-referencing them with modern county records to see which tiny whistle-stop towns actually existed. Hit number 50 yesterday, which was a place called Hackberry Siding in Kansas that only shows up on one map from 1892. Has anyone else run into a spot that vanished from every record except a single old map?

2 comments

2 Comments

miller.eva1mo agoMost Upvoted

That "only shows up on one map from 1892" bit really got me... I had a similar thing with a spot called Dry Creek Station in Nebraska. It was just a dot on one old Union Pacific map from the 1880s and then totally gone everywhere else. What finally worked for me was checking old county atlases from the same time period, not just railroad maps. They sometimes list post offices or general stores that the railroads never bothered to note more than once. Also try looking at land grant records for the area, that's how I confirmed Dry Creek was a real water stop for a few years before the line got rerouted.

barbara_kim1mo ago

That "checking old county atlases" tip is gold. My friend Dan got obsessed with a place called Bee Tree Siding in Missouri, same deal - only on one railroad map from 1888. He spent weeks just staring at that one map till his eyes crossed. Finally he pulled up some old county atlases from the 1890s like you said, and found a faded listing for a general store and a blacksmith at a spot called Bee Tree Flat that matched up exactly with where the siding was on the map. Turns out it was just a little gathering spot for farmers, not even a real town, and the railroad put a siding there because the farmers needed a place to load their grain. The siding name just got dropped when the railroad redid their maps a few years later. Dan said he felt like a detective cracking a cold case when he found that atlas entry.