Carving Up Town Boundaries

Text to come on the continual redrawing of town boundaries in Hartford region thru 1880s, as shown in Figure 1.3.11

Figure 1.3: Scroll down (or click the narrative and use keyboard down arrow) in the full-size interactive map of town borders in Hartford County, Connecticut. From the early 1600s to the late 1880s, local and state government divided the region into 29 separate towns as the European settler population grew. Boundaries shown here are not exact, but approximated from the best available digital sources: UConn Libraries MAGIC historical maps, Atlas of Historical County Boundaries at Newberry Library, and the Connecticut State Register and Manual. View open-source code and historical sources for the map, developed by Ilya Ilyankou and Jack Dougherty.

TODO: Text to come on CT 1909 school district consolidation, which redrew school district boundaries to match town boundaries

TODO: Fix basemaps and narrative for https://ontheline.github.io/otl-redraw-lines-hartford/index-frame.html

TODO: Text to come on rigidity of CT school district boundaries today, and their size relative to cities that annexed suburban land or county-wide school districts in many other states

Figure 1.4: Compare any US elementary school district boundaries side-by-side, at the same scale, in this full-size interactive map. Hover over districts to view student population and poverty data. Click any district to freeze its data panel when moving between maps. In the Northeast, many school districts are narrowly drawn along city and suburban boundaries, which concentrates student poverty, as shown in Hartford, Connecticut and its surrounding towns. By contrast, metropolitan and county-wide school districts are more common in Southern and Western states, as shown in Charlotte-Mecklenberg, North Carolina. Map data from EdBuild.org Dividing Lines, as described in their methodology. Map developed by Ilya Ilyankou and Jack Dougherty, with code on GitHub.

  1. Ilya Ilyankou and Jack Dougherty, “Map: Town Borders in Hartford County, CT from 1600s to Present” (On The Line, 2017), https://github.com/OnTheLine/otl-town-borders.↩︎

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