Hal Jespersen's Cartography Services — Free Wikipedia Maps
This page offers over 200 maps I have created for American Civil War battle articles in Wikipedia, almost always for articles I wrote myself. They are available to anyone to use or publish under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license, which means that if you use them—either modified or unmodified—you must abide by the terms of that license and attribute the images to me with the text "Map by Hal Jespersen, www.cwmaps.com." Please note that recent versions of these files have rather sophisticated, detailed background information on major battlefields, such as fences etc. If you take advantage of the source code versions of these files to create your own derivative maps with these backgrounds, you must continue to attribute your new map to me, with text similar to "Based on map by Hal Jespersen, www.cwmaps.com." It is not necessary for you to contact me in advance for permission to use the maps under these terms, although I always enjoy hearing about how my maps are used.
My free full-color Wikipedia maps are suitable for use as-is on websites or in PowerPoint presentations, but may require minor content or formatting changes to render them acceptable for publication in black and white books. I used to offer a service to do these modifications for a modest fee, but I have discontinued that option in favor of offering only versions done in my current style. Contact me for a quote.
The source files available for download are Adobe Illustrator files; quite a number of the more recent ones require he latest Illustrator Creative Cloud version. The graphic files—click on the thumbnail to access—are in PDF format, which renders faithfully at high resolution. I have heard from a few users that the ability to use PDF obviates the need for the Adobe Illustrator files at all. Some of these maps are rendered with shaded relief backgrounds, which I created from USGS national elevation datasets and then processed with Adobe Photoshop prior to importing them as a background into Adobe Illustrator. I have tried to remember to embed the Photoshop PSD files associated with these images inside the Illustrator files. Please contact me if you find one I have missed. (This should not be a problem if you are using the PDF version.) The "Recent Update" date represents only changes after April 2, 2011. (Note that I update the thumbnails shown below only when there are significant visual changes that might show up in the tiny images.)
Update January 2023: I have been culling the older, less sophisticated versions of my maps from Wikipedia, but those versions are still around on my system. If for some reason you need the older version, please contact me.
Update June 2026: I have reorganized the table to make it easier to view on small devices. Also, please note that I have not updated some of these maps on Wikipedia in a long time. The way the Wikimedia Commons works sometimes disallows me from updating my own maps! I have lost interest in supporting that bureaucracy.
Update July 2026: Clicking on the thumbnail or the title of the map now downloads a PDF file, not PNG.
Free Wikipedia Maps
Click a thumbnail or map title to download the full-size PDF map.
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 July 18.jpg)
 July 21 1000.jpg)
 July 21 1300.jpg)
 July 21 1600.jpg)
