Booster cartography: the map as advertisement

Every map in this section wants something, but the booster map wants it openly. The type specimen in the county list is the South Bend Association of Commerce's 1930 road sheet titled, as its whole argument, All Roads Lead to South Bend. The subscription atlases were booster documents by construction — the 1875 and 1911 volumes carry residence views and patrons' directories that subscribers paid to appear in, so the farm drawn largest on the township page is evidence of a purchase as much as of a farm. The commercial street-map trade kept the form: B. P. Drake's 1954 Car-Tel map sold itself as Know South Bend and Mishawaka — featuring Notre Dame Campus, “and all these extras,” Clay Township street directory included; the 1995 South Bend Industrial PinPointer mapped the county as a site-selection argument; and the 2002 comprehensive plan's corridor graphics for Capital Avenue and Blackthorn function, whatever their planning purpose, as the county's own site marketing. On this ground the booster map's purest form is the subdivision plat used as a sales sheet: from the 1985 street map that first put “Granger” in a cover title to the developer plats and corridor site-plan graphics through which the Adams Road and State Road 23 frontage was sold lot by lot, the drawing preceded the place and was made to produce it. The discipline this section applies to all of them is the register's: a booster map is read as persuasion, not evidence — its roads are promises, its boundaries are sales territories, and where a booster sheet and a survey sheet disagree, the survey governs and the disagreement is printed.

Sources: Indiana State Library, St. Joseph County Maps list (Association of Commerce, All Roads Lead to South Bend, 1930; Drake / Car-Tel, Know South Bend and Mishawaka, c.1954; Industrial Map Co., South Bend Industrial PinPointer, 1995); 1875 and 1911 atlas patron/view apparatus (see the atlas article above); 2002 Comprehensive Plan corridor record (Capital Avenue, Blackthorn); SJCPL map case (1985 Granger-titled street map).