Arizona Maps
This entry was originally written by Dwight A. Radford and Nell Sachse Woodard for Red Book: American State, County, and Town Sources.
All of the Sanborn maps of Arizona are on microfilm at the Arizona State Archives. County and city maps in various sizes may be purchased from the Arizona Department of Transportation, Highways Division, 1651 W. Jackson St., Phoenix, AZ 85007.
Map collections are also found at Arizona State University in Tempe and the University of Arizona at Tucson, Arizona 85721. The Arizona Historical Society lists several thousand maps from the Spanish era to the present.
There are two works that are important for this area of Arizona research. The first is Will C. Barnes's Arizona Place Names (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1988), which is a reprint of the classic 1935 edition. This work intersperses facts with the state's folklore to help understand place-names in the state. The second resource is Henry P. Walker and Don Bufkin's Historical Atlas of Arizona, 2d ed. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1989), which provides details on the development of the state.
The United States Geological Survey (USGS) has topographical maps of Arizona for sale, which can be found at www.usgs.gov. The USGS also has a large map library in Flagstaff that is open for research and is located at the USGS Library, 225 N. Gemini Dr., Flagstaff, AZ 86001. USGS state information can be accessed from the main USGS website (see page 5).
