County Past

About

This site gathers public data about historic newspapers, historic places, and related county history layers into one page per U.S. county, to help family historians and local-history readers find sources quickly.

Sources

  • Library of Congress, U.S. Newspaper Directory and Chronicling America (digitized newspapers). County pages may show sample front-page thumbnails (hotlinked IIIF images), short OCR snippets, and an “On this day” set of front pages for today’s month/day from past years — rebuilt with the data refresh (weekly; could be daily). Credit: Courtesy Library of Congress, Chronicling America. LoC states these newspapers are believed to be public domain or have no known copyright restrictions; U.S. papers more than 95 years old are public domain in their entirety; newer issues may contain some copyrighted third-party materials. See Rights & access.
  • National Park Service, National Register of Historic Places data and NPS NRHP location service.
  • U.S. Census Bureau county Gazetteer (county names and centroids) and historical county population series (Forstall 1790–1990), plus a public CC0 county population series through 2020 for charts.
  • Newberry Library, Atlas of Historical County Boundaries (county formation year and parent counties; free reuse with attribution).
  • NPS National Datasets Public POIs (park-unit centroids near counties). The NPS Developer API requires a free key and is not used — no account signup.
  • USGS GNIS (public domain): cemeteries from the NationalFile archive; historical populated places from the HistoricalFeatures topical extract (ghost towns / former settlements).
  • NPS American Battlefield Protection Program Civil War study-area boundaries (public ArcGIS feature service).
  • Historical Marker Database (HMdb): marker content is not embedded. Per HMdb copyright / terms, non-commercial copying with attribution is allowed, but commercial or compensated use (including publishing/display for compensation) needs written permission. Because this is a commercial site, we only link to HMdb county search pages (linking is encouraged by HMdb).

Map tiles © OpenStreetMap contributors. Pages are rebuilt automatically each week. Summaries are generated only from these data; we do not add narrative history. Data may contain errors from the source records; follow links to verify. This site is not affiliated with or endorsed by the Library of Congress, the National Park Service, the Census Bureau, USGS, the Newberry Library, or HMdb.