Download Shapefiles for use with GIS programs.

Permission for Non-Commercial use of these files is granted under a CREATIVE COMMONS LICENSE.


The Newberry Library is the copyright holder.

All files of the Atlas of Historical County Boundaries are free for use under an Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 Creative Commons License. For a full copy of the license go to: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/


Don't have a GIS program? Download ArcExplorer from ESRI. ArcExplorer is a lightweight GIS data viewer that is used to perform basic GIS functions (e.g., view, navigate, and query).
To download shapefiles: select the desired state from the table below.

You will be downloading a zipped folder containing the following files for each state: 1 master shapefile (polygons) for use with GIS programs, 2 metadata versions (summary and full FGDC), 1 database (tab-delimited text file), and 4-5 supplemental texts (2 historical chronologies, 1 county index, bibliography etc.).