Roads, mail and highways: the county for travelers

Rural free delivery, the section maps, and the general highway series

The mail drew the county first. Before the state mapped roads, the Post Office mapped delivery. The U.S. Post Office Department's Map of St. Joseph County Showing Rural Delivery Service (Washington, 1910) — the State Library holds it, and Indiana Memory serves the full image — drew every rural route radiating from every post office in the county, the farm population's geography at the moment rural free delivery finished binding the countryside to the towns; a later edition followed in the 1940s, and the library's case holds a 1929 Rural Delivery Map of the county. The RFD sheets are the landowner maps' working cousins: names and roads in service of a route, and now among the most legible pictures of the county's farm settlement at its fullest.

The section-map run. The county's own road cartography runs through the surveyors' section maps, as the State Library's list and the library's case jointly give it: a Section Map of St. Joseph County of 1917; a Road Map of 1928; Earl R. Feldman's Road Map, St. Joseph County of about 1933 (about 1:60,000) and his Drainage Map, St. Joseph County of 1934 — the drainage sheet answering the county's oldest engineering question, how to dry the Kankakee-edge marshes and the low townships, a subject the case's 1924 Drainage Map of St. Joseph County and 1938 Soil Map (eastern sheet) share; the Mirror Press Section Map of 1945 (about 1:95,040) and the Ideal Press Section Map of 1948; and the County Surveyor's own county map of 1973, issued under John R. McNamara's name — the office William Clark first held, still signing the county's map a hundred forty years on.

The state's series. Indiana's highway bureaucracy mapped the county on a cycle. Its ancestor pair is the Indiana Highway Survey Commission's two sheets of about 1936, Road and Cultural — the county drawn twice, once as pavement and once as settlement. The mature series is the General Highway and Transportation Map: issued by the State Highway Commission in 1949 and in editions of 1961, 1976 and 1980, the last from the Division of Planning of the Indiana Department of Highways with the Federal Highway Administration, at 1:160,000 on a polyconic projection — the standard county highway map of the postwar state, revised as the interstates redrew the county's roads. Between the state and county series sit the planners' sheets: the County Plan Commission's road maps of 1955 and about 1957, and Arrow Publishing's Official Arrow Map of about 1980 (about 1:75,000), the commercial county map of the late print era.

Sources:

1. Indiana State Library, "St Joseph County Maps" — the Post Office Department rural delivery map (1910, and the [194-] edition); the road map of [1928?]; Feldman's road map ([1933?]) and drainage map (1934); the Highway Survey Commission pair ([1936?]); the Mirror Press (1945) and Ideal Press (1948) section maps; the General Highway and Transportation Map editions (1949, 1961, 1976, 1980, with publishers and scale); the Plan Commission road maps (1955, [1957?]); the Surveyor's 1973 county map (John R. McNamara); the Arrow map (c. 1980).
2. St. Joseph County Public Library map case finding aid (20 December 2021) — the 1917 section map; the 1929 rural delivery map; the 1924 drainage map; the 1938 soil map (eastern sheet); the 1928 road map.
3. Indiana Memory — the full image of the 1910 rural delivery map.