The (former) Town of Kensico, NY
This is the map that got me back into map making. In January 2000, I Googled the Town of Kensico, NY, a town that hasn't existed since 1915. I was surprised to see Google return a large number of links and it got me reading up on the former town. Kensico, NY was a small town about an hour North of New York City. It was purchased by the city and leveled to make room for a reservoir for the city's rapidly growing water needs. My Internet research eventually led me to a 19th century tax map of the town. As a boy I grew up just a couple of miles from the reservoir. There were local legends about the town including one untrue) that said that the steeple of the town's church would stick up out of the water when the reservoir was low. Although I had known about the town's existence, I never knew exactly where the town was. When I found the tax map, I used Photoshop to overlayed the tax map on top of a current Yahoo map of the reservoir and figured out where the town was. I then got a USGS topo map of the reservoir and the hills that surround it and used that to created a new digital map that shows the town and how its roads connected to today's roads outside the reservoir. I have a version in Adobe Illusrator with layers for the town and the reservoir. It enables me to dial the transparency up and down revealing or hiding the town. My Kensico map partially inspired my Silk Road map. Both are places that no longer exist in the real world but live on vibrantly on the Internet.