Week 4 Blog: Rivers and Populations in the 1880s
The first thing I wanted to do on this map was add some gradient for the population before adding in the US river systems. I chose the population attribute from the table for the 1880 Birthplaces layer as a way to gauge where the people were concentrated, to begin with. The darker the shade the more dense the population, the lighter the shade the lower the population is. I then added the Major Rivers layer over the 1880s layer and the topographic features base map.
The argument I wanted to explore was if people preferred to move to areas near major rivers, it is common knowledge that people like to live near water but I wanted to create a nice visual representation. I did in fact notice that once I put the river systems layer on the map it showed denser populations near and around the major river systems. It is very clear around Montgomery Alabama between the two major rivers area quite a few largely populated counties during the 1880s.
I was unable to figure out how to export this map from ArcGIS pro with the legend and labels and the information online was not very helpful. So, just for reference, the darker the shade the lage the population and the major river systems are purple.
Thanks for sharing your map, Lelia! For your populations, are you sharing the total population by county? If so, it seems like South Carolina was a relatively heavily populated state at the time in nearly every county, which I suppose makes sense given that it was one of the earliest states--but to see the consistency of the density of population across most counties. I had assumed that some rural counties would be less populated.
ReplyDeleteVery interesting. The patterns of population at all in 1880 are fun to look at!
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