Historic Maps of South Bend: Three Centuries of Drawing the Bend in the River

Maps · three centuries of drawing the bend in the river

South Bend was mapped before it existed. French cartographers working from explorers' reports drew this river and the carrying place at its bend onto the map of a continent a century and a half before the town plat was surveyed, and every age since has drawn the place again in its own medium: the federal surveyor's ruled townships, the landowner map sold sheet by sheet, the subscription atlas, the lithographed bird's-eye, the fire-insurance draftsman's building-by-building survey, the highway department's road maps, the aerial camera, and now a county database that redraws itself daily. This section follows that record whole — who made each kind of map, what it shows at the size the evidence gives, and where the sheet lives today. The repositories recur and are named in every entry: the Library of Congress Geography and Map Division, the Indiana State Library's Indiana collection, the St. Joseph County Public Library's Local & Family History map case and its Michiana Memory digital collection, Indiana University's map collections, the Indiana Archives and the Bureau of Land Management's land records, the U.S. Geological Survey's historical archive, and the county's own geographic information system. Mishawaka, a separate city with its own later build, appears here only where a sheet covers both cities, and is boundary-printed wherever it touches this record.