The exact page text, read by your browser's voice.
M. W. Stokes, Philadelphia, 1863; engraved, printed and mounted by Chas. Shober; Library of Congress item 2013593163
The first published map of Mishawaka is a corner of somebody else's map. The Library of Congress catalog record for the Map of St. Joseph Co., Indiana describes a land-ownership map of the whole county in six sheets mounted on linen, 131 by 171 centimetres assembled — a wall map, sold to be hung in courthouses, land offices, and the parlours of men who bought and sold farms. Its publisher was M. W. Stokes of Philadelphia; its engraver, printer, and mounter was Charles Shober, whose name the record carries in the imprint's second line. Around the county's margins the map sets its insets, and the catalog record lists them in order: Mishawaka — Lakeville — North Liberty — Oceola — Terre Coupee — W. Troy — Plainfield — New Carlisle. Mishawaka's inset stands first in the catalog's list. It is a town plan at inset scale: streets, blocks, and the landowner framework the map's genre exists to show, the catalog classing the whole under cadastral and land-ownership maps with the Library of Congress's land-ownership series number 168. The sheet also carries a population statistical table, a distance table, and views of residential, public, and commercial buildings — the standard furniture of the county landowner map at its commercial height.
What the inset proves is bounded and real. By 1863 Mishawaka had a platted, saleable, nameable town form worth a land-buyer's attention — streets laid out on both banks at the rapids, a street plan a purchaser could read against the ground — and the county map's buyers were expected to care. What it cannot prove is anything at building scale: an inset is a summary, drawn to sell the county, and its lot lines answer to the recorder's plats, not to a fresh survey of every fence. The land pass's instruments govern where the two disagree.
The map's date carries a conflict, and this section carries it the way the South Bend file carries it, unreconciled. The imprint reads 1863, and the copyright line the catalog transcribes is explicit: "Entered according to Act of Congress in the year 1863 by M.W. Stokes in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the United States within & for the District of Indiana." The same Library of Congress record's Dates field, however, reads 1866, and the Library's recommended citation form dates the map 1866. The call number files it under the imprint — G4093.S2G46 1863 .S7. This build prints the map as 1863, the year on the sheet and in its copyright entry, with the catalog's 1866 named beside it; neither city's file silently corrects the other, and a reader who finds the map cited as 1866 in the Library's own citation form is looking at the same six sheets.
Sources:
- Library of Congress, catalog record for Map of St. Joseph Co., Indiana (item 2013593163): imprint, physical description, inset list, tables and views, genre and series, call number, copyright-entry transcription, and the record's Dates field of 1866 — read in full.
- This build, South Bend maps file: the same record read whole, with the 1863/1866 conflict carried identically.