Roads, Mail, and Highways, 1910–1981

The county's own maps of the automobile age began, fittingly, with the mail. The U.S. Post Office Department's Map of Allen county showing rural delivery service (Washington, 1910) drew the rural free delivery routes out of every post office in the county — a map of who was connected to the world daily, and how. The County Commissioners answered with the Map of Allen County, Indiana roads in 1917, and about 1920 the Fort Wayne Blue Print & Supply Co. published a county map giving the names of land owners, the plat book's content flattened to a wall sheet. Harry K. Gottschalk's county map of 1935 likewise indicates property owners. In about 1936 the Indiana Highway Survey Commission issued its pair of county sheets, a road map and a "cultural" map — the New Deal state learning its counties systematically. The County Surveyor's office published a county roads map about 1942.

The form matured into the General highway and transportation map, Allen County, Indiana of 1949, prepared by the State Highway Commission of Indiana in cooperation with the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Bureau of Public Roads, at one inch to the mile (1:63,360) on the polyconic projection — the standard county highway map, revised in successor editions down to the Department of Highways' 1981 map made with the Federal Highway Administration. All of these sheets are cataloged at the Indiana State Library, and the 1910, 1917, 1935, and 1936 maps are published in full through Indiana Memory. Read in sequence they show the county's skeleton changing: section-line roads first, then the state highways ruling straight lines over them, then the interstates the 1949 sheet could not yet imagine.

Sources: Indiana State Library, Allen County Maps page, call numbers I912.772 IAL 10u (Post Office Dept., 1910), [Map OS] ISLZ 912.772 IAL17 (Commissioners, 1917), I912.772 IAL20?m (Fort Wayne Blue Print & Supply Co., c.1920), I912.772 IAL35g (Gottschalk, 1935), I912.772 IAL36?c and IAL36?r (Highway Survey Commission, c.1936), I912.772 IAL42?s (County Surveyor, c.1942), I912.772 IAL49i (1949 general highway map), I912.772 IAL81 (1981); Indiana Memory full-image records for the 1910, 1917, 1935, and 1936 maps.