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The county atlas was a subscription business: canvassers sold the book farm by farm, and a family's portrait, residence view or patron's-directory line was part of what it bought. For this county the dated run, makers named from title pages and library records, is: An Illustrated Historical Atlas of St. Joseph Co., Indiana, “compiled, drawn & published from personal examinations & surveys” by Higgins, Belden & Co. of Chicago, 1875 — Clay Township at page 62, Harris Township at page 68, township directories behind them (reprinted by Selby Publishing, Kokomo, 1986); the county map in Baskin & Forster's state atlas of 1876; the South Bend Tribune's New Map of St. Joseph County (Hixson, c.1900), property owners indicated; the Standard Atlas of St. Joseph County, Indiana by George A. Ogle & Co., Chicago, 1911, “including a plat book of the villages, cities and townships of the county.” The register's expected 1895 Standard Atlas is confirmed as a catalogued edition by the St. Joseph County Public Library and the indexed land-ownership map series (land-ownership maps survive for 1875, 1895 and 1911), but its publisher's imprint was not verified from a title page in this section; the 1911 Ogle imprint is verified, and the 1895 imprint is left as a named gap below rather than borrowed from 1911. After the bound atlases the trade thins into plat books: W. W. Hixson & Co. of Rockford (county plat books, c.1920 and 1942), the Sidwell Studio of Lombard, Illinois (plat books, c.1925–1941), the County Plat & Directory Co. of LaPorte (official farm plat book, c.1966), Rockford Map Publishers (triennial atlas and plat book, 1970), and Town & Country Publishing of LaPorte (plat books, 1981 and the official plat book of 1990). The line ends where the county's own GIS begins: the same ownership geography the canvassers sold by subscription is now the county parcel layer, continuously revised and given away — the atlas trade's exact inversion.
Sources: Indiana State Library, St. Joseph County Maps list (full dated run, incl. Hixson, Sidwell, Rockford Map Publishers, Town & Country entries); archive.org full text of the 1875 Higgins, Belden atlas (index: Clay p.62, Harris p.68); Library of Congress / FamilySearch catalogue for the Ogle Standard Atlas (1911); SJCPL catalogue entry “Standard Atlas of St. Joseph County, Indiana, 1895, 1911.” GAP-35-5: the 1895 Standard Atlas title-page imprint — settler: the SJCPL / Ball State digital copy of the 1895 edition, title-page image.