Dallas through the La Réunion lens

Every parcel from the 1858 Plan des Terres appartenant à la Société de Colonisation Européo-Américaine dans le Comté de Dallas (BnF, DL 119), placed on today's map of Dallas. Survey-abstract boundaries still follow the original patent surveys, so each 1858 holding is drawn from its modern abstract polygon — the colony core (2,240 acres bought from settlers, dark red) and the thirteen reserve surveys (9,210 acres located with the John C. Read and James McLaughlin headright certificates, blue). Parcel conveyances shown in the popups come from the project's deed dataset (src/land/deeds.py); the dated site points are an authored gazetteer with per-point provenance (src/land/sites.py) — only confidently placeable sites are drawn, and approximate placements say so.

Sources: 1858 SCEAT plan; Dallas County survey abstracts (GIS); deed references from the county deed books. Acreage from the 1858 legend, with the modern polygon's computed acreage beside it. The two dashed tracts carry naming conflicts between the 1858 plan and the modern abstracts — noted, not resolved. The DCAD overlays are served live from the appraisal district's ParcelQuery service: survey-abstract lines appear from zoom 14, property parcels from zoom 15 — zoom in to compare today's property lines with the 1858 holdings.

The plat lot grid is drawn as vectors: all 330 lots of the deed-book plat (Vol. F p.409) — 528-ft "lots ruraux" of about 6.4 acres, 440-ft columns in the Read strip — generated by subdividing the abstract polygons themselves, with the plat's yellow Réunion tract as its own layer. The two historic sheets are also georeferenced as image overlays (the plat fits the survey grid within ~70 ft; the 1855 town plan chains through it — its north edge on the plat grid makes the Coombs block exactly 193 acres and the McCracken arm 32, the figures printed on the plan). From the 1858 sheet's geography, the projected Pacific & Atlantic railroad is traced as a vector line and every house and mill symbol as a point (owner or mill name where the map gives one) — georeferenced on a 26-point control network fitted to the identified parcels (~180 ft RMS; the 1858 drafting itself is schematic away from the survey grid). The roads, watercourses, buildings, and outlying lots of the 1858 sheet are a separate hand-tracing, drawn in state-plane coordinates over the county abstract fabric (Rhino drawing, src/land/drawings/, converted by rhino_export.py). The 1900 chapter's base is a hand-tracing of the west sheet of Sam Street's Map of Dallas County (1900) — houses, rentals, public buildings with their owner labels, rail, roads, water, and city limits — fitted on five survey corners picked on the sheet (~65 ft RMS at the corners; the 1900 drafting is looser between them).