Working maps and the road's own cartography

1880–1913

Between the atlas and the automobile, the town's working cartography runs in two documents: an indexed railroad-age map that lists its places like a gazetteer, and the road association's own turn-by-turn sheet that fixes the town by mileage. Rand McNally's Indexed Map of Indiana of 1880 indexes Terre Coupee and Terre Coupee Station as separate entries — the place and its depot distinct in the commercial record by 1880 — its index printing its places' populations, in its own formula, from "either census of 1879, or estimated," a commercial cartographer's honesty about his numbers that this build wishes more of its carriers shared. A generation later the road itself became the mapmaker: the Indiana Lincoln Highway Association's official turn-by-turn guide of 1913 drives the town by the tenth of a mile — its mileages 25.6, 25.9 and 27.0 through this ground, as the Story of New Carlisle section digs them — the guide being less a map than a driven text, and the first document in the file that locates the town by how a stranger actually reaches it. The corridor's whole mapped course, from Michigan Road survey to U.S. 20, stands in the Story of New Carlisle section and the highways record; this article prints the two working instruments at their strengths and points onward. One more working series belongs to this article by class: the dated street sheets — the town drawn street by street for use rather than for sale — and for New Carlisle that series is the Sanborn run itself, five editions between 1886 and 1929, taken up whole in its own article below; the working-map shelf otherwise holds no street directory map, no chamber plan and no railroad valuation sheet for this town in the record read, and the absence prints beside the two instruments that do stand.

Sources

1. Rand McNally, Indexed Map of Indiana (1880), index — read by way of its LDSGenealogy carrier in the land pass.
2. Indiana Lincoln Highway Association, official route guide (1913) — the mileages.