Historical County Plat Maps from South Central Wisconsin and Early Madison City Directories

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About the Collection

Plat book of Columbia County, Wisconsin

This digital collection of historic plat books, city directories, and atlases provides accessibility to early information about South Central Wisconsin, specifically Columbia, Dane, Portage and Wood counties. A variety of the oldest plat books, atlases and city directories were chosen because of their frequent use and delicate condition. They are widely used by the public for local history and genealogy and even for those trying to find out why a street got its name. The historic plat books help people to trace neighborhoods and streets from what was once farmland.

The early city directories for Madison provide helpful historical information on the early years of the state capitol in addition to helping those looking for information on specific people and businesses in the area in the 1800s and early 1900s. The directories provide an alphabetical list of citizens with their addresses and occupations, a classified business directory, lists of city and county officials, churches, schools, societies, streets and wards.

Funding

Historical County Plat Maps from South Central Wisconsin and Early Madison City Directories is a collaborative project completed by the University of Wisconsin Digital Collection Center and the Madison Public Library.

Historical County Plat Maps from South Central Wisconsin and Early Madison City Directories was funded through a 2006 Library Services and Technology Act (LSTA) grant. This grant provided financial support for public libraries to digitize and make available online, their local library resources. For more information about LSTA grants in Wisconsin, contact the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction (DPI) Division for Libraries, Technology, and Community Learning or visit the LSTA grant Web site at http://www.dpi.state.wi.us/dpi/dltcl/pld/lsta.html.

Additional historic city directories have been added to the collection, funded by a 2007 Library Services and Technology Act (LSTA) grant.

Contact Information

• Madison Public Library
  http://www.madisonpubliclibrary.org
  Molly Warren
  mjwarren@scls.lib.wi.us
• McMillan Memorial Library in Wisconsin Rapids
  http://www.mcmillanlibrary.org
  Andy Barnett
  abarnett@scls.lib.wi.us
• Portage County Public Library
  http://library.uwsp.edu/pcl/
  Jack Faulkner-Becker
  jack.faulkner-becker@uwsp.edu
• Portage Public Library
  http://www.scls.lib.wi.us/por/
  Hans Jensen
  hjensen@scls.lib.wi.us

Technical Note

Please note that full-text searching for the electronic-facsimile texts in our collections is based on uncorrected OCR (Optical Character Recognition) results. While such text is often highly accurate, it will contain errors that may affect your search results. In particular, texts with the following characteristics are particularly prone to error (in some cases, accuracy for such texts is so low that we have decided not to attempt to provide full-text searching):

• Hand-written texts;
• Texts that contain diacritics;
• Texts that contain non-Latin scripts;
• Texts that contain obsolete characters (including the "long S" [looks like an "f"]);
• Texts that are printed in a font in which the letters are difficult for the software to differentiate.