The State Library of SC has put a gaggle of County Road Maps on their website, probably over 700 of them.
They range in date from 1937 to at least the mid-70s. Not every county is represented in some of the earlier years.
When you look at the list for each county, they show the *base* year for the map and not the revised date for the road data. So some counties have 5 different 1937 maps which can actually be as recent as 1952.
Anyway, the 1937-45 issues are quite interesting as SC used to have a bunch of ALT routes (even for the US hwys which are not documented on anyone's hobby site) and Y-routes. More strangely, there are shields on these older issues that say just "BELT" (I have found at least 4) and I found 1 that said "SPUR". Additionally, the few 1945 issues I saw also have blank state route shields, suggesting more roads were being taken into the primary system (there are no official state maps from 1943-46 that I know of) but apparently had not received numbers. SC ditched a huge pile of primary routes in 1946 or 1947 and created the secondary system that exists today.
A quick lookthrough yesterday revealed 3 mainline state routes with numbers I was not aware of: SC 50 in Rock Hill; SC 460 near Blufton; and SC 240 whose location escapes me.
http://library.sc.edu/digital/collections/scrm.html (http://library.sc.edu/digital/collections/scrm.html)
Mapmikey
Very cool.
Forgot to mention they can also be downloaded as a picture. The "Large" size is about 5 MB but is quite legible when blown up.
Very useful if they ever pull them down or have troubles like the Virginia State Library had with their 1936 County Maps (since fixed: http://digitool1.lva.lib.va.us:8881/R/QDLBENPJBYVY3N4I3QCPL9D7MVKX3EQRFXAT1BEEV9PLCTT9KY-01561?func=collections-result&collection_id=1962&pds_handle=GUEST (http://digitool1.lva.lib.va.us:8881/R/QDLBENPJBYVY3N4I3QCPL9D7MVKX3EQRFXAT1BEEV9PLCTT9KY-01561?func=collections-result&collection_id=1962&pds_handle=GUEST))
Mapmikey
Just randomly looking at Charleston, and I like the defunct Alt 17 through downtown (defunct bannered routes are interesting to me)...plus the US 703 over on Isle of Palms.
Quote from: Mapmikey on August 15, 2012, 07:03:10 AM
They range in date from 1937 to at least the mid-70s.
A closer look shows maps up to at least 1994.
The maps were updated on different time schedules for primary route data and secondary route data, so there can be several maps of the same county from the same revised year, just different months.
Mapmikey
Thanks for posting. This is pretty cool. I was born in Walterboro, SC.