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All roads lead to South Bend, 1930 — labeled as what it is
The genre, labeled. Some maps in this record were drawn to persuade, and they are printed in this section under their own heading so that no reader mistakes their evidence. The booster map's geography is real enough in outline — the roads and railroads existed — but its argument is in the framing: distances shrink toward the sponsoring city, rival cities fade, and the county's industry appears at the size of its promise. Read as the city's claims about itself, booster sheets are first-rate evidence; read as geography, they are advertising, and this section cites them only as the former.
The chamber's sheet. The exemplar in the State Library's list is the South Bend Association of Commerce's All Roads Lead to South Bend (1930) — the title is the whole argument, the city drawn as the hub of a wheel of highways at the moment the automobile road net was new, every spoke running to South Bend. It belongs to the same civic campaign decade as the chamber's other promotions the Businesses file records, and it is the purest booster artifact in the county's cartography: a map whose subject is not the land but the market. The genre's late descendants stand in the city-map entry above — Drake's Know South Bend and Mishawaka Featuring Notre Dame Campus (about 1954), selling the region to travelers off the university's fame — and in the Industrial Map Co.'s South Bend, Indiana Industrial PinPointer (about 1995; the 1995–97 edition in the State Library's list), the site-selector's map, plotting the industrial land for the factories the city hoped to land. Three generations of the same drawing: the hub, the campus, the industrial park — each true as a portrait of what South Bend was selling, in 1930, in 1954, and in 1995.
Sources:
- Indiana State Library, "St Joseph County Maps" — South Bend Association of Commerce, All Roads Lead to South Bend (1930); Industrial Map Co., South Bend, Indiana Industrial PinPointer (c. 1995, 1995–97 ed.); B. P. Drake / Car-Tel Maps, Know South Bend and Mishawaka Featuring Notre Dame Campus (c. 1954).