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Some maps in the record are arguments about a city that did not exist yet. The Parks & Plans chapter tells the Robinson report of 1909 (presented that year, in print 1910) and George E. Kessler's engagement that followed; the cartographic artifact is Kessler's Park and Boulevard System of Fort Wayne, drawn by Geo. E. Kessler & Co. and published with his map in 1912 — the proposed chain of parks, boulevards, and riverfront drives laid over the street grid, the City Beautiful as a single sheet. Fold-out versions of the plan maps traveled with the Board of Park Commissioners' Seventh Annual Report (1911) and Eighth Annual Report (1912), the volumes the History Center catalogs in its collections and the Internet Archive also holds: the plan as the park board's annual evidence to the taxpayer.
The planning map became routine government after that. The Allen County Land Use Planning Committee issued a preliminary land use map of the county in 1940 — farmland, for the first time, classified on paper by its intended future — and the Allen County Plan Commission published its own Map of Allen County, Indiana in 1958. Both sheets are at the Indiana State Library. Between Kessler's boulevards and the Plan Commission's base map lies the whole change this chapter tracks: maps stopped being made only of what the city was, and started being made of what it meant to become.
Sources: History Center record "Report, Annual: INV 4541" (fwhistorycenter.org), on the park board annual reports of 1911 and 1912 and their fold-out Kessler plan maps; George E. Kessler, Park and Boulevard System of Fort Wayne (1912), as treated in the Parks & Plans chapter; Indiana State Library, Allen County Maps page, call numbers I912.772 IAL40p (Land Use Planning Committee, 1940) and [Map Rm-L] ISLZ 912.772 IAL58a (Plan Commission, 1958).