The 1875 Atlas (Higgins, Belden & Co.)

An Illustrated Historical Atlas of St. Joseph County, Chicago: Higgins, Belden & Co., 1875 — read in the archive.org copy, plates and directory

What it is: the nineteenth-century atlas of the checklist, and for this ground a triple instrument. Its township plates are the wholly private farm map of 1875 — every parcel in farm hands a generation before the subdivisions — against which the Neighborhoods parcel file's measurements are read. Its patrons' directory is the farmers in their own occupation words (produce-and-stock throughout), the evidence under the Farms leg's account of the corn-and-livestock order. And the volume reprints the county's first Commissioners' Record, which makes the atlas the carrier of the founding government record this build prints (see the Commissioners' Record entry in Part Two).

Its standing, from this build's experience: the atlas is the only whole-township land record of its century the build holds at first hand, and it works as a check on the book shelf rather than an illustration of it — the settler roll it prints for Harris is one of the three carriers (with Chapman and Howard) the settlement record is triangulated from, and where the three differ, all three print.

Where it fails: in its machine text. The atlas's OCR is rough in the founding passages — one constable's given name illegible, a sheriff's assessment sum garbled — and the fragments print only what survives legibly, saying so in place; no name was guessed back into the record from a garble. A printed atlas can also only show its own year: the farm map of 1875 is evidence for 1875, and this build does not let it testify about 1830 or 1900.

Sources:

1. Higgins, Belden & Co. (1875), read from the archive.org item illustratedhisto00higg — the Harris and Clay plates, the patrons' directory, the Commissioners' Record reprint.