Booster cartography: the map as advertisement, named as persuasion

The 1863 and 1875 sheets read as salesmanship

This county's first two great maps were both advertisements, and the maps leg names them so, as the floor requires — persuasion first, evidence second, each read accordingly throughout this build. The 1863 Stokes map is the type specimen: a cadastral wall map sold by subscription to the county it depicts, carrying views of residential, public and commercial buildings — the subscribers' own houses and works, drawn as honours — with its population and distance tables making the county's case for itself. To appear on it was to have arrived; to buy it was to say so. The 1875 atlas is the same instrument in book form: compiled from personal examinations, in its title page's phrase, which is also its sales method — agents walked the township, and the township's prosperous appear in its directory, its views and its patronage, while the unprosperous are cartography's silent majority in both works. This build uses both maps constantly and, after this article, knowingly: their plots, names and dates are evidence; their selections, views and omissions are persuasion, and the land-records file's lot-for-lot reading of the 1875 plat stands because a plat is a legal drawing even in a booster book. Railroad promotional mapping for this ground — the third booster class the audit names — returns nothing for Lakeville in any carrier reached: the roads that promoted land and travel across this state promoted other corridors, and Lakeville's lines sold tickets, not town lots, in the record reached. The class is named, its two local specimens identified, its third branch negative. True size.