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1835–1837
The town's first map of itself is its dedication: the plat Richard R. Carlisle laid on the scholar's quarter-section and dedicated on 15 August 1835, drawing a hundred-foot Michigan Street and sixty-foot cross streets across the prairie's edge before most of the lots had buyers.Two years later the paper town went to market in a form no Indiana village of six hundred would match for ambition: the extended plat of 1837 was lithographed in New York, in numbers, carrying "a beautiful view of the town overlooking Terre Coupee prairie" — the plat republished as an advertisement, the East its intended reader. That lithograph is this section's hinge object: as a map it is the plat's second edition; as a view it is the town's first panoramic (taken up in the bird's-eye article below); and as an artifact it is unlocated — the land leg's note records that the view exists in print and that no copy was located — so the town's first self-portrait stands in its map history as a documented absence, famous in its record and missing from every collection this build could reach.
Sources
- Howard (1907) and Chapman (1880) — the plat's dedication and street widths and Sources.