Hello yobert-ga,
Thanks for a challenging question. I'm a bit of an internet
geography buff myself, so I like to dive into questions like this one.
And I'm happy to report, the database you're looking for not only exists, but:
1. It's available free of charge, and
2. It's a US government database, which means it's in the public
domain, which means you can use it in any way you see fit, without any
copyright restrictions.
Pretty cool, eh?
Anyway, the details are below.
Before rating this answer, please let me know if you have any problems
with the files, or need any additional information. Just post a
Request for Clarification, and I'm at your service.
pafalafa-ga
==========
Head to the Gazetteer page of the US Geological Survey at:
http://geonames.usgs.gov/stategaz/index.html
Here you'll find quite an array of downloadable files, covering
numerous topics and in several different formats. Most of the files
are arranged by state, but at the bottom of the page is a section
labelled "Topical Gazetteers". These include several national
databases. The one that should be of most interest to you is:
Pop places: This is the USGS master list of populated places in the
US, and includes every city, town, village, hamlet, burb, borough,
etc. in the entire country. And for each one, there's an associated
state and county.
Pick the format that works best for you -- probably the zip file, as
these are rather large lists (25Mb, unzipped).
After opening the file, you'll see entries that look like this:
AL Abanda ppl
Chambers 330603N 0853147W Wadley South 640
and what you have, in order, is the state, place name, ppl=populated
place code, county, and lat long. The remaining items are not
relevant to your needs, I don't think -- for instance, "Wadley South"
refers to what USGS calld the "cell name", which I gather is similar
to a quad map label. A detailed explanation of the columns is
available in the "read me" file at:
http://geonames.usgs.gov/stategaz/00README.html
By the way, there aren't zip codes, but this isn't very surprising,
since many larger cities and counties are covered by a large number of
zip codes, and listing them all would make for an enormous (and
cumbersome) data set.
If the pop places file is more than you bargained for, you might also
want to have a look at the "us concise" files. These appear to
consist of only the larger (but not necessarily "large"!) towns and
cities, along with names of other features such as mountains and
lakes. The features are all identified by code, however, so you can
easily sort for the "ppl" code to identify only the populated places
of interest.
Hope this does the trick. Let me know if you have any questions.
pafalafa-ga
search strategy: Used bookmarked sites from my geography folder. |
