My 1917 map of Baja finally clicked after I found an old survey note online

I have this old oil company map from 1917 that shows a bunch of phantom towns along the coast of Baja California. For like two years I couldn't figure out why some places on the map didn't match any modern records. Last month I stumbled on a digitized field survey from 1924 that mentioned a storm wiped out three of those settlements. The map was actually accurate for its time, the towns just literally washed away. Has anyone else found a map that felt wrong at first but turned out to be correct once you dug deeper?

2 comments

2 Comments

avery_stone951mo ago

Hold on, I actually see it a bit different. Those old oil company maps are notorious for including towns that never existed to begin with - it was a common trick to catch other companies copying their surveys. I've got a 1923 map of west Texas that shows three "settlements" that were pure fiction, put there as copyright traps. Are you sure the storm story isn't just a convenient explanation that got passed around after the fact?

sanchez.sean29d ago

Yeah I've actually run into this exact thing before with old maps. The copyright trap towns are real, no question. But here's the thing - I pulled a 1930s map of the Oklahoma panhandle a few years back and started cross-referencing it with local historical society records and old newspaper archives. There was one "ghost town" that showed up on three different company maps from different decades, all in the same spot. That's not a copyright trap, those were usually one-offs. When I dug into the storms that hit that area in the 20s and 30s, I found actual telegrams and eyewitness accounts talking about whole settlements getting wiped out. The dust storms and tornadoes were so bad back then that some places just vanished without a formal record. I'd say check the multiple map sources first, if a place shows up on more than one map from different companies, that storm story starts looking a lot more plausible.