US Places, Then

us-places-mcp

An MCP server for where things were, then. Records follow the jurisdiction that held a place on the date of the event, not today's: a 1795 deed for a farm now in Greene County, Pennsylvania, is in Washington County's books, because Greene was carved out the next year. This server answers the questions that decide which office to write to:

• Which county held this spot on that date? From the Newberry Library's *Atlas of Historical County Boundaries*, which records every creation and boundary change of every US county from 1629 to 2000, dated to the day, with the act behind it. OpenHistoricalMap imported the atlas and serves it free (CC0); this server asks it.
• Where is this land description on the ground? "E½NE Sec. 18, T84N R39W, 5th P.M." becomes a centroid, a bounding box and BLM's ids, from the Bureau of Land Management's national Public Land Survey data. A map pin becomes a land description the other way.
• Where is the case file behind this land patent? The patent is the end of a process. The file at the National Archives holds the application and, for a homestead, years of residence, witnesses and citizenship papers. The server says which file and which series, and builds the search.
• Where was Mount Hope Cemetery, or Hines Corners? USGS's Geographic Names Information System (GNIS) names and places every feature it knows, including vanished towns marked "(historical)". In 2021 it dropped cemeteries, churches, schools, post offices and other built features; the server also searches the archive USGS kept from August 2021, and says which answered.
• Which post offices were there, and when? Richard Helbock's list of every US post office from 1639 to 2000, geocoded by Cameron Blevins: 166,140 offices with the years they opened and closed. A post office is often the only trace of a hamlet.
• Which old maps show the spot? Every USGS topographic map since 1884 that covers a point, oldest first, with links to the scans.

Nothing here writes anywhere, and nothing here keeps a family tree. It sits well beside nara-catalog-mcp, which can run the archive searches this server builds, familysearch-mcp and snac-archives-mcp.

This is an independent project. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or supported by the Newberry Library, OpenHistoricalMap, the Bureau of Land Management, the US Geological Survey, Harvard Dataverse, the dataset's authors or the National Archives.

Tools

The server publishes twelve tools, all read-only and annotated so for the client. Five make no network call at all.

Jurisdiction at a date

Federal land

Vanished places and old maps

From patent to case file

Setup

You need Python 3.11 or later and uv. There is no key to request.

uvx us-places-mcp

or from a clone:

git clone https://github.com/ianderso/us-places-mcp

cd us-places-mcp uv sync uv run us-places-mcp # stdio server, usually launched by the client

Claude Desktop

{

"mcpServers": { "places": { "command": "uvx", "args": ["us-places-mcp"] } } }

If the server fails to start because uvx cannot be found, give the full path that which uvx prints as the command.

Claude Code

claude mcp add places -- uvx us-places-mcp

Configuration

Nothing is required. A .env file in the directory the server starts in supplies anything the environment does not; only that directory is read.

Every URL must be https. Their hosts, and Dataverse's file store (dvn-cloud-iqss.s3.amazonaws.com, where it redirects downloads), are the only ones the server will contact.

Being a good guest

OpenHistoricalMap's Overpass server runs on donated capacity and publishes no rate limit. The server sends one request at a time to each service, two seconds apart for OpenHistoricalMap, half a second for BLM and a second for USGS and Dataverse, joins identical calls in flight, and caches answers on disk: county answers for 90 days, GNIS and map answers for 30, survey answers until you pass refresh=true. A 429 or a 5xx is retried three times with back-off, then reported as rate_limited or upstream_error, which is never the same as "nothing here".

Downloaded data

Two sources are files rather than services, so the server downloads them once and reads them locally. Nothing is downloaded until a tool needs it, and the result that triggered a download says so: what, how big, how it was checked and where it was saved.

Both are stored as SQLite files in data under the cache directory (~/.cache/us-places-mcp/data by default), never in the repository. A file that fails its check is deleted and the tool reports download_failed. cache_status lists what is there; delete the folder to start again.

How to read what comes back

• The county then, not now. A record was made by the county that held the place on the day. A new county does not take its parent's earlier records, so a deed from before Greene County existed is in Washington County's books still.
• Check dates near a change. boundary_change_within_a_year lists changes close to your date. Laws took effect on stated days, but offices took time to organise; records from those months can be in either county.
• "Attached to". Before an area was organised as a county it was often attached to a neighbour for administration, and that neighbour kept its records. county_at reads this from the atlas's event text.
• Contested ground. Pennsylvania and Virginia both governed the Waynesburg area in the 1770s, and similar disputes ran elsewhere. "status": "contested" means look in both governments' records.
• The atlas files counties under today's state. Monongalia County was created by Virginia but is filed under West Virginia; the event text says which government acted.
• The atlas ends in 2000 and holds counties only: not towns, townships or parishes as church units.
• A located tract is not a house. A section's centre is up to half a mile from any point in it, and BLM's data is a modern compilation that can differ from the original plat near correction lines and water. Lotted sections (along a township's north and west edges, or by water) have lots where a regular section has quarter-quarters.
• A parse is a reading of a reading. parse_legal_description keeps the original text and says what it guessed: a section number with no "Sec.", a meridian taken from the state.
• A patent proves a conveyance, on its signature date. The entry was years earlier: homesteaders lived on the land five years before final proof, and mid-century backlogs put years between purchase and signature. The Homestead Act took effect in 1863, so an "1856 homestead" in a family story is a cash, credit, preemption or warrant entry.
• The patentee may never have seen the land. Military bounty-land warrants were bought and sold; the veteran is in the warrant file, the patentee may be a speculator.
• No federal patents in state-land states. The thirteen colonies, Maine, Vermont, Kentucky, Tennessee, West Virginia, Texas and Hawaii granted