The political boundary datalayer is a polygon representation of town boundaries created from arcs developed from survey coordinates extracted from the 68-volume Harbor and Lands Commission Town Boundary Atlas for the 351 communities (cities and towns) in Massachusetts. The Atlas was published in the early 1900's and is maintained by the Survey Section of Massachusetts Highway Department. For communities with a coastal boundary, MassGIS has collaborated with Massachusetts Water Resources Authority and the Department of Environmental Protection to complete a 1:12000 scale coastline. The boundary for the coastline was defined as being the upland side of tidal flats and rocky inter-tidal zones. Note that the 351 communities are the official municipal names, not including "villages" or other sections of towns.This datalayer was created for the purposes of providing an up-to-date polygon version of the town boundaries for the 351 cities and towns of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. The legislative intent for some boundaries could not be mapped. Boundaries where that is true are identified in the attribute information. This layer contains multi-part polygons, one for each municipality. The coastline on this layer has been generalized for small-scale cartography and faster display in web map services.See the layer metadata for details.

Massachusetts city and town boundaries, drawn with yellow lines, and labeled with yellow municipal names, ideal for display atop aerial photography.Please see https://www.mass.gov/info-details/massgis-data-municipalities for full metadata.

Thematic map of Massachusetts cities and towns 1999: education, poverty, and income. Thematic map of Massachusetts cities and towns by percent of the 25 and older population with a high school graduate degree or higher. Thematic map of the percent of families below the poverty level in 1999. Thematic map of 1999 median household income

To access parcel information:Enter an address or zoom in by using the +/- tools or your mouse scroll wheel. Parcels will draw when zoomed in.Click on a parcel to display a popup with information about that parcel.Click the "Basemap" button to display background aerial imagery.From the "Layers" button you can turn map features on and off.Complete Help (PDF)Parcel Legend:Full Map LegendAbout this ViewerThis viewer displays land property boundaries from assessor parcel maps across Massachusetts. Each parcel is linked to selected descriptive information from assessor databases. Data for all 351 cities and towns are the standardized "Level 3" tax parcels served by MassGIS. More details ...Read about and download parcel dataUpdatesV 1.1: Added 'Layers' tab. (2018)V 1.2: Reformatted popup to use HTML table for columns and made address larger. (Jan 2019)V 1.3: Added 'Download Parcel Data by City/Town' option to list of layers. This box is checked off by default but when activated a user can identify anywhere and download data for that entire city/town, except Boston. (March 14, 2019)V 1.4: Data for Boston is included in the "Level 3" standardized parcels layer. (August 10, 2020)V 1.4 MassGIS, EOTSS 2021

The symbology of the data in this hosted tile layer is optimized for display atop aerial (ortho) imagery. Tiles are available for levels 7 through 20.Map Features for imagery include:

Political Boundaries: Massachusetts cities and towns, counties and state border, MassGIS).Transportation: Massachusetts Department of Transportation (MassDOT) Roads (MassDOT, MassGIS); MBTA subway and Commuter Rail lines and stations (Central Transportation Planning Staff, MassGIS); Airports, Ferry Routes and Seaports (MassDOT); Airport Runways and Airfields (Massachusetts Emergency Management Agency (MEMA)).Infrastructure and Facilities: Lighthouses and Lights (Massachusetts Coastal Zone Management); Licensed Child Care Programs (Department of Early Education and Care); Schools (Pre-K-High School) (Massachusetts Department of Education, MassGIS); Colleges and Universities (MassGIS); Acute Care Hospitals and Non-acute Care Hospitals (Massachusetts Department of Public Health Office of Emergency Medical Services, CHIA); Libraries, Police Stations, Fire Stations, Town Halls, Places of Worship, Courthouses, Prisons, DCR Pools.This service is used in the MassGIS Image Basemap.

This map service displays the year in which cities and towns in Massachusetts were first settled by Europeans. The data were gathered by the Secretary of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Sources include: 2010 Census Report; Community Profiles, Department of Housing and Community Development; Historic Atlas of Massachusetts, University of Massachusetts Press 1991.Data source: https://www.sec.state.ma.us/divisions/cis/historical/incorporation-settlement.htmFeature service also available.

This political boundary layer is the most accurate representing the city and town boundaries in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

This datalayer has been created from latitude and longitude coordinates found in the 68-volume Harbor and Lands Commission Town Boundary Atlas. This Atlas series, and updates since it was published, describes the legal boundary for each of the 351 municipalities in Massachusetts. These coordinates were recorded from surveys of the location of each boundary marker around the periphery of each community. Each survey was tied into higher order monumented survey control points. The Atlases also include detailed descriptions of each community's boundary and location maps for each of the original boundary marker locations. The original surveys were conducted in the 1890s. The Atlas series was published in the early 1900s and has since been updated by the Survey Section of the Massachusetts Highway Department with changes as they are approved by the legislature. MassGIS staff collaborated closely with staff from the Survey Section during the development of this data layer. MassGIS staff keyed the coordinates into a database; that data entry was double-checked by staff from the Survey Section. Staff from the Survey Section then converted the latitude/longitude coordinates to the NAD83 datum and also created a version of the coordinates in state plane coordinates with units of meters. MassGIS used the state plane coordinates to "generate" points in ArcGIS. Boundary arcs from the existing USGS-derived municipal boundary data layer were then snapped to the survey-derived points. The differences between the municipal boundary arcs digitized from those on the USGS quads and those created by snapping to the survey-derived coordinates are typically plus or minus 12 feet, although these differences are sometimes less and sometimes more. Some municipal boundary arcs (about 15% of the total) follow the edge of a road or rail right-of-way or a stream or river channel. In these cases, the new boundary arcs were "heads up" digitized based on features visible on the statewide 1:5,000 color orthos from imagery flown in 2001.

For communities with a coastal boundary, MassGIS collaborated with the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority and the Department of Environmental Protection to complete a 1:12,000 scale coastline.

City/Town names' labels are included in this service.

(This service was published from a map document using the Web Mercator projection for the data frame.)

For full metadata please see http://www.mass.gov/itd/townsurvey.

Cities and towns in Massachusetts that joined the movement for a #StateWithoutStigma.See http://www.mass.gov/eohhs/gov/departments/dph/stop-addiction/state-without-stigma/ for more.

The 2022 cartographic boundary KMLs are simplified representations of selected geographic areas from the U.S. Census Bureau's Master Address File / Topologically Integrated Geographic Encoding and Referencing (MAF/TIGER) Database (MTDB). These boundary files are specifically designed for small-scale thematic mapping. When possible, generalization is performed with the intent to maintain the hierarchical relationships among geographies and to maintain the alignment of geographies within a file set for a given year. Geographic areas may not align with the same areas from another year. Some geographies are available as nation-based files while others are available only as state-based files. The cartographic boundary files include both incorporated places (legal entities) and census designated places or CDPs (statistical entities). An incorporated place is established to provide governmental functions for a concentration of people as opposed to a minor civil division (MCD), which generally is created to provide services or administer an area without regard, necessarily, to population. Places always nest within a state, but may extend across county and county subdivision boundaries. An incorporated place usually is a city, town, village, or borough, but can have other legal descriptions. CDPs are delineated for the decennial census as the statistical counterparts of incorporated places. CDPs are delineated to provide data for settled concentrations of population that are identifiable by name, but are not legally incorporated under the laws of the state in which they are located. The boundaries for CDPs often are defined in partnership with state, local, and/or tribal officials and usually coincide with visible features or the boundary of an adjacent incorporated place or another legal entity. CDP boundaries often change from one decennial census to the next with changes in the settlement pattern and development; a CDP with the same name as in an earlier census does not necessarily have the same boundary. The only population/housing size requirement for CDPs is that they must contain some housing and population. The generalized boundaries of most incorporated places in this file are based on those as of January 1, 2022, as reported through the Census Bureau's Boundary and Annexation Survey (BAS). The generalized boundaries of all CDPs are based on those delineated as part of the Census Bureau's Participant Statistical Areas Program (PSAP) for the 2020 Census.

Background and Data Limitations The Massachusetts 1830 map series represents a unique data source that depicts land cover and cultural features during the historical period of widespread land clearing for agricultural. To our knowledge, Massachusetts is the only state in the US where detailed land cover information was comprehensively mapped at such an early date. As a result, these maps provide unusual insight into land cover and cultural patterns in 19th century New England. However, as with any historical data, the limitations and appropriate uses of these data must be recognized: (1) These maps were originally developed by many different surveyors across the state, with varying levels of effort and accuracy. (2) It is apparent that original mapping did not follow consistent surveying or drafting protocols; for instance, no consistent minimum mapping unit was identified or used by different surveyors; as a result, whereas some maps depict only large forest blocks, others also depict small wooded areas, suggesting that numerous smaller woodlands may have gone unmapped in many towns. Surveyors also were apparently not consistent in what they mapped as ‘woodlands’: comparison with independently collected tax valuation data from the same time period indicates substantial lack of consistency among towns in the relative amounts of ‘woodlands’, ‘unimproved’ lands, and ‘unimproveable’ lands that were mapped as ‘woodlands’ on the 1830 maps. In some instances, the lack of consistent mapping protocols resulted in substantially different patterns of forest cover being depicted on maps from adjoining towns that may in fact have had relatively similar forest patterns or in woodlands that ‘end’ at a town boundary. (3) The degree to which these maps represent approximations of ‘primary’ woodlands (i.e., areas that were never cleared for agriculture during the historical period, but were generally logged for wood products) varies considerably from town to town, depending on whether agricultural land clearing peaked prior to, during, or substantially after 1830. (4) Despite our efforts to accurately geo-reference and digitize these maps, a variety of additional sources of error were introduced in converting the mapped information to electronic data files (see detailed methods below). Thus, we urge considerable caution in interpreting these maps. Despite these limitations, the 1830 maps present an incredible wealth of information about land cover patterns and cultural features during the early 19th century, a period that continues to exert strong influence on the natural and cultural landscapes of the region.

    Acknowledgements
    Financial support for this project was provided by the BioMap Project of the Massachusetts Natural Heritage and Endangered Species Program, the National Science Foundation, and the Andrew Mellon Foundation. This project is a contribution of the Harvard Forest Long Term Ecological Research Program.

MassGIS' standardized ("Level 3") property tax parcel mapping data set was developed through a competitive procurement funded by MassGIS. Each community in the Commonwealth was bid on by one or more vendors and the unit of work awarded was a city or town. The specification for this work was Level 3 of the MassGIS Digital Parcel Standard. Standardization of assessor parcel mapping is complete for all 351 Massachusetts' cities and towns. MassGIS is now incorporating updates from municipalities into the database. This hosted feature layer is exported from MassGIS' internal database of the feature class GISDATA.L3_TAXPAR_POLY_ASSESS, which links L3_TAXPAR_POLY and L3_ASSESS. The export includes the expression: (POLY_TYPE IN ('FEE', 'TAX')) OR (POLY_TYPE IN ('ROW', 'PRIV_ROW', 'RAIL_ROW', 'WATER') AND PROP_ID IS NOT NULL) It contains several fields from GISDATA.L3_ASSESS and stacked polygons where multiple assessor records link to a parcel. It contains features that do not have an associated record in GISDATA.L3_ASSESS, except for rights of way and water bodies. ROWs and water bodies with a non-null PROP_ID are included. The data in this feature layer is used for the popups in the Massachusetts Interactive Property Map. See full data descriptionA hosted tile layer will draw very quickly at map scale of 1:18,056 (level 15) to 1:564 (level 20).

Town of Natick, MA printable Map

This map service from MassGIS displays the 26 Massachusetts Gateway Cities, municipalities with:population greater than 35,000 and less than 250,000;median household income below the state average;and rate of educational attainment of a bachelor’s degree or above that is below the state average.Read more about Gateway CitiesMap service also available.

MassGIS' standardized assessors’ parcel mapping data set contains property (land lot) boundaries and database information from each community's assessor.The data were developed through a competitive procurement funded by MassGIS. Each community in the Commonwealth was bid on by one or more vendors and the unit of work awarded was a city or town. The specification for this work was Level 3 of the MassGIS Digital Parcel Standard.This map service contains three feature classes and one table.Feature service also available.See the datalayer page for full details.

Town of Barnstable, MA GIS Maps - various PDFs

MassGIS has processed Massachusetts municipalities (cities and towns) from the U.S. Census Bureau's 2020 data release for Massachusetts to assist GIS users who may need access to these value-added datasets. These data are suitable for use with Census 2020 products and certain Census publications and demographics surveys created after 2020.See datalayer metadata.Map service also available.

This file contains the 65 cities and towns in Massachusetts for which MBTA bus or rapid transit service is provided. This data is based off of the 2010 census. The legislative intent for some boundaries could not be mapped. Boundaries where that is true are identified in the attribute information. Name Description Data Type Example town_name Full name for the MA town or city identification. String Boston town_id MassGIS Town-ID Code (alphabetical, 1-351) Numeric 34 sum_acres Area covered by the town or city in acres. Double 31304.22 sum_square Area covered by the town or city in square miles. Double 48.91 Use constraints: This data set, like all other cartographic products may contain inherent aberrations in geography or thematical errors. The boundaries included in this data set were developed using accepted GIS methodology. Cartographic products can never truly represent real-world conditions due to several factors. These factors can include, but are not limited to: human error upon digitizing, computational tolerance of the computer, or the distortion of map symbology. Because of these factors MassGIS cannot be held legally responsible for personal or property damages resulting from any type of use of the data set. These boundaries are suitable for map display and planning purposes. They cannot be used as a substitute for the work of a professional land surveyor.MassDOT/MBTA shall not be held liable for any errors in this data. This includes errors of omission, commission, errors concerning the content of the data, and relative and positional accuracy of the data. This data cannot be construed to be a legal document. Primary sources from which this data was compiled must be consulted for verification of information contained in this data.

This is a seven-category land-cover map of Essex, Massachusetts. The seven categories are: bare soil, coniferous trees, decidous trees, grass, impervious surface, water, and wetlands. Note: Complete metadata is available within the downloaded zip file. This metadata can be viewed with ESRI ArcGIS software, and can be exported to FGDC and ISO metadata formats.

This is a seven-category land-cover map of Andover, Massachusetts. The seven categories are: bare soil, coniferous trees, decidous trees, grass, impervious surface, water, and wetlands.

            Note: Complete metadata is available within the downloaded zip file. This metadata can be viewed with
            ESRI ArcGIS software. These files can also be exported to FGDC and ISO metadata formats.

This datalayer is part of a group of layers used for research in the Ipswich River Watershed. This layer was created in July 2006 for Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) in Woods Hole. This layer shows the boundaries for the towns in the Ipswich River Watershed and the Parker River Watershed. This data layer was created so that the town boundaries would correspond to the boundaries of the corresponding land use maps. This datalayer has complete information. Display town boundaries for the study area.