They use Google maps now.

For decades, though, prospective homebuyers got their first overhead view of The Woodlands while standing at a topographic table in the master-planned community's information center. The exquisitely detailed model showed every house, grocery store, office building, park, roadway and school.

Without it, you couldn't see the forested enclave for the trees.

But the model is no longer needed. That's because of technology and timing. Satellite images are easily accessible on phones and tablets. The Woodlands, meanwhile, is almost built-out - a proud, telegenic township with some 110,000 residents nestled among the tall pines.

Still, some people don't want to lose sight of the model. The Woodlands' governing board is considering plans to move it from the recently shuttered information center to the town hall, where it would be put on display like a museum piece.

The move would cost about $50,000, plus roughly $150,000 to construct a place for the triangular table at the town hall. But board members said it's worth the expense to save a piece of history for a 42-year-old community that doesn't have a lot.

"This is a good starting place for the township's plans to protect the history of The Woodlands," said Gordy Bunch, the board's chairman.

The original version of the model is about as old as The Woodlands, which was created in 1974 by the late George P. Mitchell as a new style of suburb, a place to live and work, with a satisfying mix of urban and pastoral.

At the time, his vision was difficult to explain to Houstonians, who understood suburbia as strips of houses without any connectivity. The project's size and scope was also hard to comprehend because Mitchell was building the community in the piney woods without cutting all of them down.

"When Mr. Mitchell put together the plan, there was no place like The Woodlands," said Tim Welbes, co-president of The Woodlands Development Co. "There were plenty of words the planners could use to describe it. But people wanted to know what it was going to look like."

So the developer commissioned a topographic model of the 28,000-acre community. The model is built to a scale of 1:3,000, which is large enough to get the detail needed, but small enough to fit into the information center.

The original model was replaced by the current one in the mid-1990s, when the information center moved to a larger building on Woodlands Parkway.

The model was updated annually to show existing and proposed structures and roadways. Prospective homebuyers could press buttons to light up areas of interest, and children could show their out-of-town grandparents the wooden cube that represented their house.

The Woodlands Development Co. didn't keep track of how many people visited the information center. But you would be hard-pressed to find a resident who hadn't spent time with it.

"Every Realtor who was worth their salt met their clients there," said Laura Fillault, a board member who moved to the township from Sugar Land in 2012. "You could see everything, and it made The Woodlands look unique."

Bunch and his wife, Michelle, studied the model, too, when they were looking to move to The Woodlands in 1995. "Michelle and I walked around it to see what the future would look like," he said. "Back then The Woodlands dead-ended into Kuykendahl," near where they eventually bought a house.

"It is amazing to see all the growth The Woodlands has realized in the past 21 years," Bunch said.

Even as the internet gave people easy access to satellite images, the development company continued to employ a hobbyist to maintain and update the model. Hughes Landing, a mixed-use project with a luxury apartments, office buildings, restaurants and a Whole Foods, was added to the model before the information center was closed.

"It's like a 10-key calculator," Welbes said of the model. "It's old school now. But it was very effective."