A little bit of background.

This was just an idea I had.  I have hundreds of photos taken in and around Huffman Mill Indiana (or Huffman's Mill, or just Huffman) over the years.  As I get older I realized that I really don't remember much about the town.  The mill itself was gone years before I was born, but there are reminders of it and its time in history in many of the papers and other artifacts I have or have seen.  Like everyone else I wish I had payed more attention to my dad and my grandmother Huffman when they told what they knew about the history and legends surrounding Huffman Mill.  I decided to see what I can derive from the various photos and information that I do have.  This blog might not go anywhere, but then who cares!

The first thing to look at is where the mill was located.  I have always been a fan of maps and mapping, so this seems like a good place to start.  The mill is located on the Anderson River 7.5 miles from where it enters the Ohio River near Troy Indiana "as the crow flies".  If you were on a flatboat, the river distance is 17.5 miles. If you are a fan of GPS systems, the mill site is at 38^o 06' 10.19" N, 86^o46' 40.94" W.  The town is easy to locate on many maps since it had a Post Office back in the early days and is thus on many state and local highway maps. 

This first image shows the problems I am sure I will run into.  These are plat maps from the late 1800's of the area around Huffman.  I scanned the images from the historical atlas of each county and put them together as best I could using Photoshop.  Notice how the Anderson river has two rather different locations in 1879 and 1894.  While the river does meander over the years many of the changes are obvious errors since whole hills certainly don't move that drastically!  I note that the covered bridge in the later image appears to be in the wrong spot as well.  You can mouse click on this (and other images in this blog) to enlarge them for better visibility.

This next image is again two images combined in Photoshop.  In this case an image captured from Google Earth is superimposed on a topography map of the area. One would expect both of these to have a fair degree of accuracy, and indeed, the agreement is excellent.

The next two images show the above map with first, the Google Earth image highlighted, followed by the same image with the USGS topology map emphasized.

Finally, I generated the following with all of the above combined--all this shows is that you can't put too much faith in older maps (and you can't overlay more than two maps)!  It is a challenge to try to overlay the older maps (1800's) with the Google and USGS maps.  Not only are there problems with scaling, but even simple things like the section and range lines do not agree well.  If you click on the image below it will enlarge enough to see the bridge and roads.

The lesson here is that while early maps are interesting and can give tons of information, not all that information is correct.  About the only thing the above image tells us is that given the approximate location of the section lines, the river and roads run all over the place!