I recently learned about and experimented with the website from the United States Geological Survey (usgs.gov). They have an area on their website called Topoview and it lets you overlay old maps onto current maps. I like the road maps that let you "look back into the past". I have wondered a lot about U.S. Route 23. I remember, as a young girl, traveling north on 23 for what seemed like an eternity; the four of us crammed in the back seat legs touching. Ick. I would stare out the car window, taking in the countryside. Even now, some 40-odd years later, I have flashes or images or feeling the endless ka-thump of the seams in the roadway. My daughter lives in Toledo now and I'm in the Columbus area so I travel up U.S. 23 and every time I take that drive, I look off to the side of the roads and see small towns or homesteads and I clearly remember some sights that I can no longer see on 23. And I know we did not travel as fast as we do on modern roads. Of course, modern U.S. 23 reveals an attractive high-speed route 15 to I75 starting in Carey, Oh with a speed limit of 70 mph. I was in the car on those roads in the mid-1970s and I can't imagine we went over 55 mph in our 1963 Chevrolet Impala or whatever that red rocket model was, and using 2/40 air conditioning. If you don't know what that is, you'll have to Google it.
I decided to look back at the route U.S. 23 took in the 1960s, before many of the small-town bypasses were constructed. I overlaid maps from about 1960-1962 onto modern road maps to create the route from north Columbus to the Michigan line. It seems like a lot of changes happened in the mid to late 1960s. If you are someone who is old enough to be on the roads at that time, you might remember this route. I'd kind of like to ride my motorcycle on this route up to my daughter's house. To be fair, when we drove up 23, we were usually headed to Cedar Point or East Harbor Park and my mom said we took Route 4 through Bucyrus on those trips.
Here's the map of 1960s U.S. Route 23 from north Columbus to the Michigan state line. If you like, copy the link into a browser window for a copy of the map:
https://www.google.com/maps/d/u/0/edit?mid=1TtJYfTdBrovLhB5ihDLs9FgI5ivxg7w&usp=sharing
To navigate it, download the GPX file here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ubhlLwiI0K4r-Gpen7mKdBzG0o1Z4neA/view?usp=drive_link
Enjoy your ride!
***note: I haven't driven this map yet, so watch out for road changes or mistakes!
