It’s a wednesday in June and Howard Veregin is exploring Walker in Wood County. This location in central Wisconsin is one of seven suspected “phantoms” that the Wisconsin state cartographer would vet that day, but this one stood out. Pulling over to the side of the road, Veregin could see a handful of large buildings that looked like warehouses. Many of them were on the older side, but they appeared to be in operation. A cranberry company sign offered a big clue about what he had stumbled onto, but it was still unlike any other phantom he had visited.
“This one building was really amazing — it looked like it was from the 1920s,” says Veregin. “But while I was looking at it, a couple of pickup trucks pulled up next to me.”
Thankfully, the drivers were friendly cranberry growers. One of them leaned out the window and chatted with Veregin.
Truck driver: Good morning. Looking for something in particular?
Veregin: Well, I’m looking for cartographic phantoms.
Truck driver: What’s a cartographic phantom?
Veregin: It’s a community that is listed on a map, but it doesn’t exist on the ground.
Truck driver: This place exists.
Veregin: Sure, but it doesn’t really look like a community. What is it?
Truck driver: Well, this is our family cranberry farm. We’ve been farming cranberries here for 125 years. I’m a fifth-generation cranberry grower. Most of this area is private property.
As it turns out, the property is located on a former railway stop called Walker Junction, which historically had been used to ship out cranberries. But that was years ago. The station and the name Walker haven’t been used in at least a generation, and now the land was almost entirely privately owned by this family of cranberry growers.
So, Veregin’s suspicions were confirmed. This wasn’t an unincorporated community like so many versions of the Wisconsin state map suggest — he had found yet another cartographic phantom.
The Wisconsin State Map is Wrong
Maps of Wisconsin are littered with towns, villages and cities of all sizes. Most, of course, are listed correctly, but many of those little dots are nothing but phantoms, signifying forgotten patches of land where there once was a town. Hunting down these phantoms — and correcting the maps that list them — has become a bit of an obsession for Veregin. He’s been studying maps since he declared geography as his major in 1978 — that’s 27 years before the launch of Google Maps.
“If you’re a map user and you see Walker with a small circle and text suggesting it’s a town that you can visit, you might stop in and get circled by pickup trucks,” Veregin says. “It’s a misrepresentation and misinformation to the map user if these places are displayed using the same symbology that you would use for a community.”
Most cartographic phantoms aren’t dotted with buildings as Walker is. Typically, there’s a whole lot of nothing. Phantoms are the remnants of abandoned unincorporated communities (unincs). These small communities are recognized places but, as the name suggests, are not officially incorporated. Unincs often share their name with local landmarks, like a railway stop or the town tavern. But these already slight communities, usually located in rural areas, are known to shrink or disappear altogether thanks to the societal migration toward more urban environments. That’s when they become ghost towns (when the bones of buildings are still visible) or cartographic phantoms (when there’s nothing left).
Wisconsin has a lot of the latter. In fact, the State Cartographer’s Office, which is Wisconsin’s resource for all things maps, has identified more than 600 potential cartographic phantoms in the Geographic Names Information System (GNIS) database. That means there could be hundreds of places mislabeled in the data systems that inform map providers like Google Maps, Apple Maps and even printed atlases.
Take Clyde, for example. If you look at a map, you might think it’s another town located near one of Wisconsin’s most bustling tourist areas, Door County. But drive there and you won’t find much of anything.
“We’re not trying to eliminate phantoms,” Veregin says. “We’re just trying to get them properly identified as phantoms — not as communities where you could stop and get a coffee and a sandwich or something.”
When Veregin started as the state cartographer in 2009, he realized no one was collecting data about unincs or phantoms — not even the Census Bureau, the state or individual counties. So, what started as Veregin’s passion project has since become a one-of-a-kind effort for the Wisconsin State Cartographer’s Office, which is housed within the College of Letters & Science as part of the Department of Geography.
“I thought this sounded like it could be kind of a fun project,” Veregin says. “It’s important for improving maps and nobody else is doing it, so let’s give it a try.”
Thus began Veregin’s phantom-finding quest. He started by identifying hundreds of potential phantoms on different types of maps and putting them into a geographic information system (GIS). Then he hit the road, literally. For the last 15 years, he’s been driving to hundreds of potential phantoms to collect photos and data as evidence of whether the communities listed still exist. He hopes to use these findings to get the United States Geological Survey (USGS) to correct the GNIS, and thus fix the many Wisconsin maps that are informed by it. The problem is, the State Cartographer’s Office keeps finding more and more phantoms.
“When I started out all those years ago, it seemed like an impossible idea that I would ever get to the end of visiting places and taking pictures,” Veregin says. “But somehow over the course of time that happened, and it was a momentous event. But it was immediately kicked to the ground by the fact that we realized there are a lot more phantoms. So, now we have a whole lot more work to do.”
Finding Phantoms Faster
Enter Mike Hasinoff (’22). He’s a GIS research analyst for the State Cartographer’s Office, and the phantoms project has become one of his main assignments. He’s looking to find ways to streamline the process and find phantoms without sending Veregin to every uninc in the state. This is an especially big time saver, because there are more than 1,000 unincs in Wisconsin, and not all of them are phantoms. Minocqua — a popular vacation town in northern Wisconsin — is just one example of an uninc that has a vibrant community.
So, Hasinoff created a software program that he calls the Fast Phantom Finder. Here’s how it works: The Fast Phantom Finder looks at places that are suspected phantoms and creates a quarter-mile buffer around the location. It then cross-references that area with the Wisconsin Statewide Parcel Map to see if there are any significant residential, commercial or agricultural properties nearby. If there are zero, then it’s a strong phantom contender.
“The methods are geared toward finding nothing,” Hasinoff says. “That’s what helps us narrow things down.”
But identifying the phantoms isn’t enough. Hasinoff still needs evidence to prove that these communities are gone — evidence like the photos Veregin’s been collecting for years.
“In order to get USGS to change these maps, they need us to be 99.99% sure,” Hasinoff says.
While Veregin still hits the road regularly to scope out these locations, Hasinoff is also looking for ways to crowdsource some of the research. When he gives talks about the project, people will look at the map and see possible phantoms in their neck of the woods. He asks them to check out the area and snap pictures. He’s also looking at geotags on photos that are publicly available and even considering setting some of the phantoms as geocaching destinations as a way to find out what’s out there. To see a a map of potential cartographic phantoms and see if there are any in your area, go to go.wisc.edu/ug13z7.
“When I present, people will say ‘that’s near where I live,’” Hasinoff says. “This project is something people can see themselves as part of and identify with it.”
All Over the Map
Cartographic phantoms aren’t unique to Wisconsin — they’re all over the country. But this groundbreaking research about them is only happening here in the Wisconsin State Cartographer’s Office. And the work is starting to get attention. Recently, Veregin heard from a map provider who’s interested in implementing their research to correct their maps.
“They want their map to be better than Google’s,” Veregin says.
The creation of the Fast Phantom Finder could help make this work more widespread, though not every state has as good of a parcel map as Wisconsin’s, and most states don’t even have a cartographer’s office.
“Wisconsin has one of the best parcel maps in the U.S.,” Hasinoff says. “And Wisconsin has the only state cartographer’s office that is attached to an academic department, allowing opportunities for cross-pollination with research staff, faculty and students,” Veregin adds.
Veregin and Hasinoff are aiming to build a better map for Wisconsinites to use in the future, but they’re also building a record of the state’s past. Many of the stories they’ve uncovered during the phantoms project have informed another effort by the State Cartographer’s Office, Vanishing Wisconsin. The goal of their new project is to create a historical digital atlas for the state. It’s still in an early phase, but the collection of forgotten communities could eventually become a digital documentation of Wisconsin’s past.
“We strive to be the Wisconsin Idea in action,” Hasinoff says.
