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Chicago: Higgins, Belden & Co., 1875 — 116 pages
What it is: An Illustrated Historical Atlas of St. Joseph Co., Indiana — Compiled, Drawn & Published from Personal Examinations & Surveys by Higgins, Belden & Co., Lakeside Building, Chicago, 1875, catalogued by the Indiana State Library in its Atlas & Plat Book Collection. Part map book, part history: alongside the township plats it carries a written history of the county, institutional sketches (St. Mary's Academy among them), and David Rohrer Leeper's list of the county's 1849 California argonauts, prepared, Leeper says, "with considerable care." The Crime leg drew the Cottrell matter from it; the Corridors and Maps legs drew the record of William Clark's copying order preserved in its history of the county's mapping.
Its standing, from this build's experience: an atlas is a surveyor's book, and this one is at its best exactly where a surveyor would be — land, roads, mills, institutions standing in 1875. Its historical text is a contemporary's account, five years older than Chapman's, and where the two differ this history prints both. The copy the legs used is the Allen County Public Library's, and the St. Joseph County Public Library hosts the atlas page by page as PDFs on its own site — the most convenient first-hand route into the book that exists.
Sources:
- Indiana State Library, St. Joseph County maps and atlases listing (call number IR912.772 S143at) — title, imprint, and the 1986 Selby reprint.
- Title page of the atlas as scanned (Higgins, Belden & Co., Lakeside Building, Clark & Adams, Chicago, 1875).