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1875 · Run B #188
The map as persuasion, named as persuasion: the subscription atlas was the nineteenth century's advertising medium disguised as geography. A Chicago atlas house canvassed the county, sold subscriptions to the farmers and merchants whose names, farms and portraits would fill it, and published a volume in which to appear was to have paid — or to have been worth courting. The 1875 illustrated historical atlas of St. Joseph County is this ground's specimen whole: its Osceola plate (p. 41) draws the village at its railroad-depot best, and its Penn Township plates (pp. 86–87) carry the township's farms as a grid of prosperous ownership, with five lithographed farm views printed in the Farms leg of this build — the subscribers' houses, barns and fences drawn from the road in the genre's flattering hand, every fence straight and every orchard full. Read as evidence, the plates must be discounted by their business model, and this build already prints the discount in numbers: the same atlas gives the village “about 300” people where the federal census, five years later, counts 129 — booster arithmetic of the same hand that drew the plates. The plates are therefore carried in this section as what they are: the earliest drawn portrait of the town and township, made to sell the county to its own residents and to the next settler, and evidence of how the place wished to be seen in 1875 — not of how it stood. One conflict in the volume's own identity prints here whole, because it is this section's book: this build's Sources, People and Population legs cite the 1875 atlas as Higgins, Belden & Co., An Illustrated Historical Atlas of St. Joseph Co., Indiana — the imprint the volume's own title page carries, as its digitized text at the Internet Archive confirms (“Compiled, Drawn & Published from Personal Examinations & Surveys — Higgins, Belden & Co., Lakeside Building, Chicago, 1875”) — while the Businesses and Farms legs cite the same 1875 atlas as Andreas & Baskin. The two citations stand unmerged in the fragments; the title page, read first-hand, governs the imprint, and the Andreas & Baskin form is printed here as the build's unresolved second citation, flagged for assembly.
An Illustrated Historical Atlas of St. Joseph Co., Indiana (Higgins, Belden & Co., Chicago, 1875): title page and index read in the digitized volume (Internet Archive); the Osceola plate (p. 41) and Penn Township plates (pp.