From Selma to Claiborne

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This map depicts the stretch of the Alabama River as it runs between the city of Selma and the ghost town of Claiborne. This map was commissioned in part to show the route down the river that was taken in the 1930s by a couple undergoing a sort of "pilgrimage" to Claiborne, which once held the distinction of being among the largest settlements in Alabama in its first years as a state.

Because the map was meant to depict the landscape as it appeared in a period long before the first NLCD products were produced, my usual approach of complementing topography with true land cover data simply wouldn't work for this map. However, I was able to come up with a workaround: since the major change in land cover in this portion of Alabama is the transition between the prairies of the Black Belt and the forests of southern Alabama, my solution was to use the approximate boundaries of the Black Belt physiographic region (with data provided by the Geological Survey of Alabama) as a polygon that could mask out the base shade of green meant to represent forests across the rest of the map. The harsh edges of this shape were blurred to convey the sense of a more gradual transition between the two land cover types (and physiographic regions) being depicted.