A side-by-side look at the US Places, Then and Scrivener MCP MCP servers: transport, auth, tools, quality signals, and the config to install either one in Claude, Cursor, Windsurf or VS Code.
Verdict: choose US Places, Then for location services work as a local process; choose Scrivener MCP for knowledge & memory as a local process. You can also run both side by side in one mcpServers block.
county_at, county_history, parse_legal_description.Rows where the two servers differ are marked.
| Spec | U US Places, Then | |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Location Services | Knowledge & Memory |
| Quality signal | 53/100 · Good | 61/100 · Good |
| Install command | Confirmed | Confirmed |
| Transport | Local subprocess (stdio) | Local subprocess (stdio) |
| Auth | No auth required | No auth required |
| Pricing | Free | Free |
| Required env vars | None listed | None listed |
| Verified owner | Community listing | Community listing |
| GitHub stars | 0 | 67 |
| Directory activity | 0 views 0 installs 0 upvotes | 18 views 12 installs 6 upvotes |
| Tools | 12 | Not listed |
| Full listing | View US Places, Then | View Scrivener MCP |
county_atThe county (or counties) that held a point on a date: a day, a month or a year. Returns the holder, its dates, the event and statute that made it, the whole chain of counties for that spot, changes within a year (check those by hand), and whether two governments contested it.county_historyEvery version of one county: created when, from what, and each later change, with statutes.parse_legal_descriptionRead a land description, however it is written (`E½NE`, `E2NE`, `E 1/2 NE 1/4`, "the east half of the northeast quarter", GLO's padded `0840N`, lots, several tracts), into its parts, with quarter-quarters and warnings for anything guessed. Offline.plss_locatePlace a description on the map: centroid, bounding box, acreage and BLM's ids, to the township, section, quarter-quarter or lot.plss_from_pointName the survey tract at a point: township, range, section and quarter-quarter.public_land_stateWas this state federal land? If not, who granted first title and where those records are; if so, its meridians and special cases. Offline.find_place_nameA named place in GNIS: its point, class, state and county. Searches the live GNIS and, given a state, the archive of August 2021 that keeps the cemeteries, churches, schools, post offices and buildings GNIS dropped that year; says which answered.post_officesWhich US post offices existed, 1639-2000: by name, by state and today's county, or around a point, and in a given year. Each with its years, whether it ran continuously, and its point if it was geocoded.historical_topo_mapsEvery USGS topographic map covering a point, oldest first: date, scale and quadrangle, with GeoPDF, GeoTIFF and JPEG preview links, and a TopoView link for JPEG and KMZ.find_land_entry_fileFrom a patent's Authority: the kind of entry, what its file holds, which National Archives series has it, ready-made arguments for nara-catalog-mcp's `search_records_advanced`, and how to order the file if it is not online. Offline.glo_linksA link to a search, or to one record, on BLM's General Land Office Records site, for you to open. Offline.cache_statusThis session's live calls and cache hits, and the datasets downloaded so far. Offline.No tool names declared yet. Check the project README from the listing page.
Paste either block (or both) into your client config, e.g. claude_desktop_config.json or ~/.cursor/mcp.json. We only show a config when the install command is confirmed.
{
"mcpServers": {
"us-places-then": {
"command": "uvx",
"args": [
"us-places-mcp"
]
}
}
}
{
"mcpServers": {
"writerslogic-scrivener-mcp": {
"command": "npx",
"args": [
"-y",
"scrivener-setup"
]
}
}
}