The exact page text, read by your browser's voice.
Higgins & Belden, the Standard Atlases, and the plat-book publishers
What an illustrated county atlas was. The big county atlases of the 1870s were subscription books, sold farm to farm by canvassers before they were printed. The maps and the county history were the book's spine; its revenue was the rest — the lithographed views of subscribers' residences and businesses, the portraits, the patron lists — content a family paid to have included, printed beside the township maps whether or not the farm was notable for anything but the payment. That model governs how this section reads every atlas below: the township maps, drawn from the survey record and the publishers' own examinations, are evidence; the views, portraits and biographical sketches are paid placements, and are used in this history, where they are used at all, at that standing.
The 1875 Higgins, Belden atlas states the trade's method on its own title page: An Illustrated Historical Atlas of St. Joseph Co., Indiana, "Compiled, Drawn & Published from Personal Examinations & Surveys" by Higgins, Belden & Co. of Chicago (Indiana State Library call IR912.772 S143at; the Allen County Public Library's copy is scanned in full at the Internet Archive; a Selby reprint was issued at Kokomo in 1986). Its own index gives the contents: the county map at page 2; a "Connected Map of South Bend City" at page 15 with the city's east and west parts on following spreads; a map for every township; plats of the county's villages — Lakeville, Plainfield, West Troy, Crum's Point, New Carlisle, North Liberty, Osceola, Walkerton — and of Mishawaka in its south and north parts, boundary-printed here as the neighboring city's sheets inside this county's book; a history of the county and of South Bend, a history of the churches, a history of the Studebaker Manufacturing Company, a township-by-township directory of residents, and the state, national and world maps the trade padded its books with. The atlas's county history is quoted elsewhere in this section — it preserves the commissioners' record of the county surveyor's 1831 order — which is the atlas trade's double nature in one volume: a vanity book that is also, in its history and its maps, a record nothing else kept.
The Standard Atlas line. The Chicago house of Geo. A. Ogle & Co. rebuilt the county atlas as a standardized product, the "Standard Atlas" — a plat book of the villages, cities and townships bound with state, national and world maps. The record reached attests the line here at two dates a generation apart: a Standard Atlas of St. Joseph County dated 1895 — the title and year the county's own National Register documentation cites, and whose county land-ownership map the national land-ownership collections carry — and the 1911 Standard Atlas the Indiana State Library catalogs under Ogle's name. Between them, the county's farm landscape is drawn twice more at parcel scale, each edition redrawing ownership as the land turned over. The 1895 edition's publisher is carried in this section at the strength of that attestation; the Ogle imprint is proved for 1911 and is the series' known house, and the fuller catalog pull is named among this section's update tasks rather than asserted here.
The plat-book century. After the atlases, the trade thinned into the plat book — township maps and an index of landowners, no views, no histories — and it ran for a hundred years. The Indiana State Library's list gives the county's run: W. W. Hixson & Co.'s plat books of about 1920 (the county's volume in a statewide set of six); the Sidwell Studio's plat books in parts across 1925–1941; Frederick J. Anderson's Atlas of the Cities of South Bend and Mishawaka (South Bend: G. L. Hughes, 1923), the one city-scale atlas of the era, its Mishawaka half boundary-printed here; Hixson's Atlas of St. Joseph County (Rockford, 1942); the County Plat & Directory Co.'s Official Farm Plat Book and Directory (LaPorte, about 1966); Rockford Map Publishers' Triennial Atlas & Plat Book (1970); Town & Country Publishing's plat books of 1981 and 1990; and the LaPorte house of Authentic, Inc.'s editions of 2000 (the fifth), 2003 (the seventh), 2010 (the eleventh) and 2014 (the thirteenth) — each carrying the county highway map, the township maps, the city street maps and the index of landowners. A trade born selling lithographed farm portraits ended, thirteen editions deep into the twenty-first century, as a spiral-bound working tool that the county's farmers, assessors and title searchers still bought — and its run overlaps the county GIS by a decade and a half, the paper and digital records of the same parcels kept side by side.
Sources:
- Indiana State Library, "St Joseph County Maps" — the 1875 Higgins, Belden atlas and its 1986 Selby reprint; the Standard Atlas title; the Hixson plat books (c. 1920) and 1942 atlas; the Sidwell Studio plat books (1925–1941); Anderson's Atlas of the Cities of South Bend and Mishawaka (1923); the County Plat & Directory Co. farm plat book (c. 1966); Rockford Map Publishers' Triennial Atlas & Plat Book (1970); the Town & Country plat books (1981; 1990); the Authentic, Inc. editions (2000, 2003, 2010, 2014, with edition numbers and contents).
- An Illustrated Historical Atlas of St. Joseph Co., Indiana (1875) — title page and index read in full at the Internet Archive: the county map, the Connected Map of South Bend City, the township maps, the village and Mishawaka plats, the histories and the directory.
- National Register documentation for Portage Manor and the national land-ownership map collections (the U.S. Indexed County Land Ownership Maps) — the Standard Atlas of 1895 attested by title and year; St. Joseph County Public Library holdings list the Standard Atlases of 1895 and 1911 together.