I used to work for NRCS doing the vegetation part for mapping wild areas in Alaska (which had not been mapped before) and have high regard for NRCS mapping and data (though a lot of the data are of such high precision and technical specialty that they’re difficult even for me, a professional geographer/ecologist, to decipher). The most convenient thing might be to contact your local NRCS, USDA, or maybe cooperative extension office and see if they have any printed copies left (= free), then you can make notations, etc. of the data, carry it around in your car, etc. Or a pdf version. The hardest thing is to use the GIS data & tables, the second hardest is web soil survey!
Years, now decades ago, when soil surveys were printed and free it also used to be the best (or only) way to get aerial photos of your entire county as the surveys always had soil unit maps drafted over the black & white aerials!
My county, Luce, in Michigan, only had one survey printed, in 1929! Because there’s little agriculture & population it never had much of a priority.
But these old soil surveys are of interest to the history freaks among us - they had great hand-drafted maps that show features - like farms, homesteads, orchards, etc. that have vanished decades ago & haven’t been put on soil maps in many decades. Most if not all of these old surveys are available as pdfs from NRCS (and elsewhere), but if you like old books and colorful old maps you may try looking for originals.
One more related source, which isn’t available for all areas, are surveys done in the 20s & 30s during the ‘land economics’ era, which was an attempt to use high-quality surveying & mapping to create comprehensive land data to better manage natural & land/economic resources (like farming practices & reforestation) after the disasters that followed the mismanaged deforestation and the huge and deadly slash fires that caused so much death & damage over huge areas in the wake (dwarfing in area and numbers of the dead of even the mega-fires of recent years and having profound influence on our modern landscape & vegetation 125 or more years later).
I know that Michigan had the MI Land-Economic Survey, Minnesota had the Minnesota LES, Wisconsin had the Wisconsin Land Economic Inventory (aka the Bordner Survey), and others I don’t know much about.
Wisconsin has scanned most of the vast data from that (another), Minnesota I believe a lot (example), and Michigan [almost none] (but here’s a map from my county)(Welcome to Antrim County, MI).
These were extensive multi-resource surveys of all sorts of land-use activities & resources including forests, soils, geology, farming, homesteads, etc. made by teams of CCC-type surveyors who would walk an intensive grid mapping features (with high skill & precision), interview farmers, etc. (the methodology varied by state as these were state funded not federal).
The maps are amazing, beautiful, and show things that while long gone in many instances from the landscape can still be seen in old apple trees, foundations, lilacs, old railroad grades, etc. - all this stuff being useful for seeking out old fruit trees…
