Working City Maps, 1874–1965

Alongside the portraits ran the tools. The State Library's earliest city sheet after the Whistler plan is the Map of the city of Fort Wayne, Ind.; compiled from the original records to date, lithographed by Braden & Burford at Indianapolis in 1874 — a records map, drawn from the plats and surveys rather than from imagination. The directory trade produced the most useful of the century: W. H. Goshorn's Map of the City of Fort Wayne, compiled from the original records for R. L. Polk & Co.'s city directory and dated 1885 by the Allen County–Fort Wayne Historical Society. On the Goshorn map, dots mark the schools, public buildings, factories, and churches, and half-mile lines are ruled outward from the courthouse — a commercial geography of the city in one sheet. The History Center's digital collections, hosted by Purdue Fort Wayne, serve it through Indiana Memory. Four years later the booster version appeared: an 1889 blueprint map of Fort Wayne, held by the State Library, which prints beside the streets the length of the city's railroad lines, its population, and its largest businesses with their numbers of employees — the city as an argument for investment, drawn in blue lines.

Polk's directory maps of 1897 and 1902, held in Indiana University's Indiana Historic Maps collection, carried the working map into the new century, and the real-estate trade added its own instrument in 1929: Nirenstein's National Realty Map Company's map of Fort Wayne's business section (Nathan Nirenstein, Springfield, Massachusetts), drawn for the valuation of downtown frontage. After the war the official map returned to official hands: the City Engineer's Official street map, city of Fort Wayne of about 1955, and the Board of Public Works' Official 1965 street map, both at the State Library, with commercial mapmakers — Car-Tel in 1955, the Champion Map Corporation through the 1970s and 1980s — selling the folding street map at every gas station the Sanborn surveyors would once have drawn.

Sources: Indiana State Library, Allen County Maps page, call numbers I912.772 IALF74d (1874), I912.772 IALF 89 (1889), I912.772 IALF29f (1929 Nirenstein), I912.772 IALF55f (City Engineer, c.1955), I912.772 IALF65p (Board of Public Works, 1965); Indiana Memory record PFW_cc_acfwhs-525 (Goshorn map, 1885, History Center Digital Collections via Purdue Fort Wayne); Indiana University Image Collections Online, Indiana Historic Maps (Polk 1897 and 1902), via ACGSI, Maps of Allen County.