Many individual states have date of incorporation (different from "founding" in a settlement sense, but there you are) in datasets of incorporated areas, both tabular and geodata-based.
Date of settlement is a little fuzzier: date of first recorded human settlement? first non-indigenous settlement (the landmark of record in a lot of older sources)? establishment of a church or post office or store? And incorporation is a little confusing because merging of cities, change in status of incorporated area (village vs city in Wisconsin, for example), and other quirks of sub-state organization may get in the way. Was New York City incorporated in 1653, the date of its charter, or 1898, when the new City of New York was formed from multiple older municipalities, including the old City of New York?
Nat Case INCase, LLC Minneapolis, MN USA 612-702-1333On 2/2/23 2:53 PM, Susan Powell wrote:
Hello all,I received a question from a researcher looking for a "dataset of all the towns in the USA and the dates they were founded."
The first thing that came to my mind were gazetteers, but none of the digital/data-based once I looked at included dates.
There are a few book gazetteers I found that appear to have founding date information:Historical Gazetteer of the United States by Paul T. Hellmann (not comprehensive)American places dictionary : a guide to 45,000 populated places, natural features, and other places in the United States ... in four volumes by Abate, Frank R.Omni gazetteer of the United States of America, by Abate, Frank S
The researcher mentioned a Census dataset that costs money.
Does anyone know of something like this that's available in dataset form?Many thanks!Susan--
Susan Powell