Switzerland County, Indiana Map with Townships and Land Area

How to use this map

The map opens on the Divisions view with all 6 of Switzerland County’s municipalities drawn straight from Census boundary files. Click any one to pin it and read its figures: land area in square kilometres and its share of the county. The tabs above the map change what the shading means. Divisions gives each unit its own colour so you can tell neighbours apart at a glance. Land area shades by size. Satellite drops one metre aerial imagery under the boundaries. Blank outline strips the fill away for printing or tracing.

The figure people misread is land area. Census land area excludes water, so a municipality with a lake or a river frontage looks smaller in the table than it does on the map. Posey is the clearest case here: its boundary encloses 105.65 square kilometres but only 101.56 of that is land, leaving 4.09 as water. If you are measuring something that sits on the ground, use the land figure. If you are measuring something that follows the boundary, use the polygon.

What this county is made of

Switzerland County holds 6 townships. Pleasant is the largest by land area at 117.87 square kilometres and York the smallest at 61.43, which makes the largest roughly 1.9 times the size of the smallest. The median sits at 95.76 square kilometres, so the spread is wide but most units cluster nearer the middle than the extremes.

The county as a whole held 9,737 people at the 2020 Census, which across 571.53 square kilometres of land works out at 17 per square kilometre. That figure is for the whole county. This map does not put a population against each individual unit, and the reason is worth stating plainly rather than hiding behind a blank column.

In Indiana the incorporated cities and towns are separate legal entities from the townships drawn here. A city can sit inside one township, straddle two, or extend across a county line entirely. Pairing a list of city populations with a map of township boundaries would attribute people to the wrong polygon and produce totals that do not add up. Showing land area, which is measured against the same boundaries the map draws, is the honest thing this data supports.

What the boundaries do tell you is how the ground was divided. Most of these lines come from the Public Land Survey System, which laid the country out in six mile squares from a small number of survey origins long before most of the roads existed. That is why so many of the units here are close to the same size and close to square, and why the ones that are not tend to sit against a river, a state line or a lake shore where the grid ran out.

Where the data comes from

Boundaries come from the Census Bureau TIGERweb county subdivision layer, which is the authoritative source for municipal geography in Indiana. Land area is the Census land measurement, which excludes inland water.

The sources are joined on municipality name, and that join is worth checking rather than trusting. The 6 land areas sum to 571.52 square kilometres against a published county land area of 571.53, which agrees to the hundredth.

Aerial imagery, and how it is fitted to the map

The Satellite tab pulls one metre aerial imagery from the USGS National Map. One metre means each pixel covers roughly a square metre of ground, so at full zoom you can pick out individual buildings, field boundaries and the line of a farm track. That resolution matters at this scale. The national and state maps on this site use a NASA composite at five hundred metres per pixel, which is fine for showing where Indiana sits in the country and useless for showing where a municipal line runs.

The boundaries are drawn in an Albers equal area projection fitted to this county, with standard parallels set inside its own latitude range. Equal area matters here because the map is shaded by area: if the projection distorted area, the shading would be lying. The imagery arrives in Web Mercator and is reprojected to match.

A check you can repeat on paper

Take Pleasant. Its land area is 117.87 square kilometres, which is 20.6 per cent of the 571.52 square kilometres in the county. Add the 6 land figures in the table and you should land back on 571.52.

Mistakes that catch people out

Reading polygon area as land area. The map draws boundaries, and boundaries include water. This county encloses 578.6 square kilometres of polygon against 571.52 of land, so 7.08 is water, about 1.2 per cent.

Assuming a city is bigger than a town. In Indiana those words describe charter type, not size. York township is the smallest unit here at 61.43 square kilometres.

Assuming municipal lines follow roads or rivers. Many were surveyed as charter grants or survey townships long before the roads existed. The straight lines on this map are the original survey, not modern infrastructure.

Related Calculators and Reference

• Indiana County Map, for all 92 counties and where Switzerland sits among them
• United States Map, for the national view and how Indiana compares
• Massachusetts County Map, for the same treatment applied to another New England state
• US Census Bureau Geography, the source for boundaries, land area and population