Wisconsin Land Economic Inventory / Bordner Survey Maps
(Access Bordner Images and Download Sample Images in Google Earth)
John Bordner in hayfield, Rusk County, 1927
The Wisconsin Land Economic Inventory, commonly named for its director John Bordner, was a massive effort carried out statewide under the aegis of the Department of Agriculture between 1929 and 1947 (and between 1937 to 1941 the State Planning Board). Its mission was to document current and potential uses of land resources in all parts of the state so that exhausted, marginal, or idle lands could be more productively utilized. In total, the Bordner Survey maps are a rich source of data and, much like the original General Land Office survey notes and subsequent maps of original vegetation, a snapshot of the Wisconsin landscape at a critical crossroads in its history.
One of the Inventory’s goals was to, in the manner of the original GLO surveyors a century earlier, cover every forty-acre section in the state. To this end, forestry students and trained Civilian Conservation Corps workers surveyed the land at half-mile intervals, producing hand-drawn field maps on form templates at a scale of four inches to one mile for individual sections of Public Land Survey System townships. Surveying crews exhaustively mapped current land cover and use, recording improvements such as houses, schools, churches, town halls, cheese factories and creameries, logging camps, various commercial structures. In addition, they inventoried infrastructure such as all types of roads and trails, railroads, telephone lines, the size and quality of timber stands, and indicated signs of erosion and forest planting recommendations. All counties were surveyed but Lincoln, Manitowoc, Sheboygan, and Milwaukee, while Menominee County was created in 1961 and was previously part of Shawano, Oconto, and Langlade Counties. Additionally, in some counties, national forest lands and Native American reservation lands were not surveyed.
Survey crew, Summit Lake (Sawyer County), 1932
Mapping of the Survey
The resulting field maps were aggregated to produce large-scale linen PLSS township maps at the same four inch-to-one mile scale. These were later photo-reduced to produce small-scale, 8-1/2 x 11” bound compilations for each surveyed county. For many years the extant static maps have been used by local and state policy-makers and planners; ecologists, foresters, soil scientists and other researchers and county/state officials; and by landowners and other public stakeholders with a focused interest in past land cover and use.
Digitization and Online Access
Small areas of the Inventory data have been vectorized and automated for use in specific GIS project analyses. However, the Bordner Survey maps have only been available in static form and only at the above-named centralized repositories until their relatively recent addition to the UW Digital Collections. They nonetheless remain flat files in archived analog or digital form, having never been georeferenced and systematically manipulated and made available and distributable via a modern web interface.
The WHS Library-Archives Division curates the complete collection of county field maps, large-scale linen maps, and small-scale county compilations, along with the Bordner Survey’s field notes and other addenda. Incomplete collections of the small-scale compilations exist in the UW-Madison Robinson Map Library and Steenbock Library holdings. The Ecology and Natural Resources Collection of the UW Library Systems Digital Collections makes the township survey maps available to browse, search, and view as image files at preset sizes.
Modern 3D Visualization of Bordner Survey Maps
A Pilot Study by Samuel F.B. Johnson (UW-Madison GIS Certificate Program)
With the advent of popular, free Web 2.0 web mapping and visualization offerings like Google Earth, NASA World Wind, and ESRI’s ArcExplorer, and the example of renowned map collectors such as David Rumsey, given past and present stakeholders in the Bordner Survey maps the potential for giving them a new life with digital cartographic technologies is obvious. This effort, through the State Cartographer’s Office, in association with the UW Digital Collections Center and with the cooperation of the Wisconsin Historical Society, establishes one methodology for georeferenced, seamless display of these historical maps in Google Earth, utilizing six diverse, representative Wisconsin locales as examples to spark renewed interest in this rich cartographic collection.
Download KML Files:
To view the KML files you will need one of the following free viewers, Google Earth or ArcGIS Explorer, click the links below to download and view KMZ (zipped KML files) layers for the sites in the following counties:
| Sauk | St. Croix |
| Trempealeau | Vernon |
| Vilas | Waukesha |
| All Sites |
Project Documentation and Methodology
Image Processing Instructions and Resources
Additional Reading & Online Collections:
Read Touching Every Forty by John Koch (Wisconsin Magazine of History, Summer 2006)
Browse or Search the complete Wisconsin Land Economic Inventory map collection
More information on Wisconsin Historical Society Library-Archives cartographic holdings