Panoramic Maps

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The Panoramic Maps, 1847-1929, collection depicts U.S. and Canadian cities and towns during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Also known as bird's-eye views, perspective maps, and aero views, these panoramic maps are drawings of cities portrayed as if viewed from above ground level looking down at an oblique angle. Panoramic maps were frequently commissioned by a chamber of commerce or real estate agency and were often subscribed to by various members of the rising middle class who displayed views of their hometown with great civic pride. These maps reveal much about the great contrasts and contradictions of the industrial age and the progressive era.

1) Industrialization and the Development of U.S. Cities

Raleigh, North Carolina, C. Drie, Mapmaker and Publisher, 1872.

Search and select the map of a small town such as Delphi, Indiana; a mid-size location such as Lexington, Kentucky, or Buffalo, New York; or a large city such as Chicago, Illinois, or San Francisco, California, and examine the urban landscape. Stores, houses, industrial plants, harbors filled with ships, trains in motion, parks and city thoroughfares filled with pedestrians, buggies, automobiles, and much more are rendered by the mapmakers. Use the "zoom" feature provided with each map. For example, click on this map of Raleigh, North Carolina and use the options at the bottom of the page to enlarge the area of the map above the word "Raleigh" to see trains.

The mapmaker of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1902 shows factories and foundries belching the smoke that made Pittsburgh one of the nation's most industrially polluted cities throughout the first half of the twentieth century. What other evidence of industrialization and the growth of U.S. cities do you see in these maps? The Guilded Age, as the late nineteenth century was known, was considered an age of extremes. Why do you think that was? What mood or feeling did the cartographers convey in their depictions of America's industrialized towns and cities? Do you believe that the costs and benefits of industrialization were in balance during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries?

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, T. M. Fowler, Cartographer, 1902.

Every era manifests its own contrasts and contradictions, and the industrial era was no exception. At the same time that pollutants from industrial furnaces poured across the rising cities, individuals such as John Muir and his friend President Theodore Roosevelt jump started the Conservation Movement. Although the movement began as an attempt to save the beauty of the wilderness, it eventually grew to include a concern for the urban environment. Today's environmental movement did not begin until the 1962 publication of Rachel Carson's book Silent Spring. At that time, Americans began to question deeply their faith in a progress so rooted in industrial development and technology.

2) Westward Expansion

The promise of new lands and economic opportunities (often depicted in panoramic maps) inspired many people to head west in the nineteenth century. By the mid-1800s, pioneers were crossing the plains and the Rockies to follow dreams of gold, land, or other business opportunities. In the wake of this westward expansion, towns and cities grew rapidly in number and size. Panoramic maps were a boon to real estate agents looking to sell land in and around these burgeoning urban centers. The maps allowed the potential buyer to ascertain potential business opportunities in the existing infrastructure, the gaps in development, and the sites where vacant land was available for development. Indeed, these maps were used to attract commerce and to spur real estate sales as often as to foster civic pride.

Eureka, California, Britton & Rey, Photo-Lithographers, 1902.

Read stories of those who made the long trek west in the collection "California as I Saw It:" First-Person Narratives of California's Early Years, 1849-1900. Then search on the names of towns mentioned in these narratives in Panoramic Maps, 1847-1929. Or, browse the collection's Geographic Location Index to find maps from a particular time period or from a given state.

• What does the map of Aberdeen suggest about the role of the railroad in this town? What does the fact that the town was laid out by a railroad agent suggest? Who published this map and what does this suggest about the town?
• What does the map of Grand Haven suggest about the relationship between Native Americans and westward expansion? Why might a cartographer have included this visual reference to Native Americans in his map? What does this reference suggest about the town depicted?
  
• How did Native Americans respond to the development of towns such as Aberdeen?
• What interaction, if any, existed between towns such as Aberdeen and Native American reservations?
  

Along with numerous treaties, the U.S. government established military installations and reservations to keep Native Americans from uniting to drive away settlers in the prairie states as well as on the western frontier. A few panoramic maps depict these nineteenth-century military encampments. See, for example, a bird's eye view of Fort Collins, Colorado in the 1860s. This fort was established in 1864 and wagon trains, which may be seen in the map, departed from there to travel the Cherokee Trail. The collection also includes an 1891 view of Fort Reno, Oklahoma Territory. It was not until the battle of Wounded Knee in 1890 that the U.S. military ended Native American resistance on the western frontier.

3) Immigration

New York, New York, August R. Ohman, Publisher, 1907.

Between 1880 and 1920, 27 million immigrants, mainly from southern and eastern Europe, entered the United States, in a few cases lured by what they saw depicted (accurately or not) on a panoramic map. Cities such as New York, Boston, Baltimore, and New Orleans were the gateways for immigrants coming to the United States. Search on the names of these and other such cities to view panoramic maps of those locations. Do the maps show evidence of the influx of immigrants? Do the maps depict these cities as the immigrants would have seen them? Compare a 1907 map of New York, New York with early films of both Ellis Island and an immigrant ghetto in the city. To find the films, search on the term immigrant in the collection, The Life of a City: Early Films of New York, 1898-1906.

Trace the origins of your own family. Then, search for maps of the different cities where your ancestors and their families settled. Why did your family members choose to migrate to the locations they chose and not to other places?

• Knowing what you know today, to which city depicted in the panoramic maps would you have chosen to migrate if you had arrived on U.S. shores between 1870 and 1920?


• In the mid-nineteenth century, the Know Nothing Party was against having non-Anglo-Saxon Protestants, particularly Catholics, immigrate to the U.S. Find out in which cities the Know Nothings (also known as Nativists) were the strongest, then search to see if there are panoramic maps of these cities. Do the maps hint at anything about politics and immigration?
  
• In what way is the issue of labor related to the issue of immigration? Does a scarcity of jobs fully explain the strong anti-Chinese movement in the West, increased lynching in the South, or the prevalence of anti-Catholic attitudes in Texas or Massachusetts?


• How did the idea of national unity manage to develop amid the growing cultural diversity of the second half of the nineteenth and early twentieth century? How might the panoramic maps have detracted from or contributed to this sense of national unity?
  
• Learn more about these topics in the Learning Page's feature, Immigration.
  

4) Improvements in Printing and the Emergence of Popular Culture

The proliferation of the mechanized printing press and nineteenth-century improvements in lithography, photoengraving, and other printing processes, coincided with the period depicted in Panoramic Maps, 1847-1929. Such strides made it possible to produce multiple inexpensive copies of these maps. These processes also made possible the inexpensive production of song sheets, advertising flyers, magazines, and colorful baseball cards. These materials became far more accessible to the average American during the second half of the nineteenth century and a "popular culture" began to emerge from coast to coast. That is, aspects of culture came to be shared, to greater or lesser degrees, across lines of region, race, religion, politics, and class.

Dan Moeller, Jersey City, 1909-1911. Baseball Cards, 1887-1914.

New York and Brooklyn, with Jersey City and Hoboken, Parsons & Atwater, Cartographer, Currier & Ives, Publisher, Copyright 1892.

"Everybody's on Their Way to Jersey,"1920, Historic American Sheet Music, 1850-1920.

See the collections, Historic American Sheet Music, 1850-1920, Music for the Nation, 1870-1885, and Nineteenth-Century Song Sheets to learn more about popular music of the era. See Baseball Cards, 1887-1914 to learn more about another item of popular culture that owed a debt to improved printing techniques.

• Through print, the United States was beginning to refine its self-definition locally, regionally, and nationally. How did the print medium contribute to America's definition of itself as a nation?
• How did the print medium contribute to defining regional and local identities?
• How did the panoramic maps, specifically, contribute to these definitions?
• What are the similarities and differences between the panoramic maps and the other print materials of the time? Consider the audience, subject matter, funding, distribution, and use of these materials.
  

5) Railroad Transportation

Panoramic maps depict many cities that lay along railroad routes. It is possible to better understand the importance of the railroad to a particular city by setting a panoramic map along side other historic materials concerning that city. For example, by drawing from the collections, Railroad Maps, 1828-1900 and Pioneering the Upper Midwest, ca. 1820-1910, as well as Panoramic Maps, 1847-1929, on can form a composite picture of Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin, in the late 1860s and early 1870s.

This is another of the important points on the upper Mississippi River. It is one of the oldest settlements in the Northwest . . . beautifully located on a level prairie several miles in extent, about four miles above the mouth of the Wisconsin River. Prairie du Chien is the Western terminus of the . . . Prairie du Chien branch of the Milwaukee & St. Paul Railroad, and is a shipping point of considerable importance, as much of the wheat of Minnesota and Iowa is brought here in barges and transferred to [rail]cars, and a large amount of the merchandise transshipped from the cars to steamers, for points on the upper Mississippi. . . . a large passenger trade is also done. The population is about 4000. The town contains six churches, several fine hotels, good schools, &c. It is 71 miles from Dubuque, 292 miles from St. Paul, 194 miles (by rail) from Milwaukee.

Page 25 [Transcription]
The Minnesota Guide. A Handbook of Information for the Travelers, Pleasure Seekers and Immigrants . . .,
Pioneering the Upper Midwest, ca. 1820-1910.

Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin, Albert Ruger, Mapmaker, 1870.

Completed Lines of the Milwaukee and Saint Paul Railway Company, G.W. & C.B. Colton & Co., 1872. Railroad Maps, 1828-1900.

• How does compiling these sources (dated 1869, 1870, and 1872) help you to understand the city of Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin?
• What are the similarities and differences between the way that each item depicts the railroad and its role in Prairie du Chien?
• What purposes do these items suggest that the railroad served in this town?
  
• What might have been the daily routine of a railroad conductor in the upper Midwest or that of a steamboat pilot on the upper Mississippi?
  

A contributing factor to the financial crisis known as the Panic of 1857 was the fact that railroads had overbuilt and too often defaulted on debts. In domino fashion, land schemes and development projects that depended on projected new rail routes failed as well. Although by 1868 the town of Portage, Wisconsin appears to have regained firm financial ground, it had suffered a setback in 1857 when plans to make it a terminus for a northern branch of the La Crosse and Milwaukee Rail Road failed because of the economic downturn. Other towns along the projected route, such as the site that railroad surveyor Andrew McFarland Davis, called the "brisk new town" of Chippewa Falls, also suffered when the panic prohibited follow-through on A Preliminary Railroad Survey in Wisconsin.

• How might the failure of railroads have affected the growth and ultimate identity of cities such as La Crosse and Chippewa Falls?
• What other forms of transportation existed in these cities? How might theses various modes of transportation have affected the growth and identity of these places?

Put together maps and other items pertaining to specific locations to develop an understanding of the importance of land and railroad development to the growth of the upper-Midwest region during the mid-nineteenth century. What materials might you draw upon to compose a multimedia portrait of, for example, Sheboygan, Wisconsin, Davenport, Iowa, or Bismarck, North Dakota? After you find a panoramic map with which you wish to work, search across the American Memory collections on the name of the city depicted in that map.

6) Water Ways

Notice that nearly all the cities depicted in panoramic maps lay along a river, a lake or an ocean. Access to waterways was just one element of the infrastructure that made a city viable. This access ensured not only potable water but also a power supply for industrial development, and a corridor for the shipment of goods and produce. Remember that sailing craft were central to the transport of agricultural supplies, industrial goods, and the U.S. mail until the early twentieth century.

Towns that had a harbor depended on them for growth and development and the panoramic mapmaker obligingly depicted their ports as busy and industrious places. Among the busy port cities of the Great Lakes region, there are panoramic maps of Duluth, Minnesotta, Erie, Pennsylvania, and Saginaw, Michigan. Along the Mississippi River, there were other busy ports for the mapmakers to record, such as New Orleans, Louisiana, and St. Louis, Missouri.

Examining these maps and complementing them with other items from American Memory affords a better understanding of the roles and significance of waterways. For example, what does this map and citation pertaining to Columbus, Georgia, suggest about the role of the Chattahoochee River in this city?

As the Chattahoochee crosses the fall line at Columbus, Georgia, it falls 125 feet within 2 1/2 miles producing a potential energy of between 66,000 and 99,000 horsepower. That water power made Columbus one of the leading industrial centers within the South, attracting investors and entrepreneurs. As early as 1828 the river powered a grist mill and by the 1840s it supplied power for several textile mills. By 1880 Muscogee h. p. per sq. mile was greater than any other county south of New York. Conversion of that power to electricity began with arc lighting in 1880. Page 1 Water Power Development at the Falls of the Chattahoochee, Built in America: Historic Building and Engineering, 1933-Present.

Columbus, Georgia, H. Wellge, mapmaker, Beck & Pauli Lith. Co., 1886.

• What is located along the waterways that are depicted in these maps? Businesses, warehouses, factories, mills, churches, schools, residences?
• What is the relationship between the waterways and the roads and railways of these towns?
• What do these maps suggest about the purposes that waterways served in these places?
• What aspects of the cities' lives were dependent upon the waterways? Would cities have been viable in these locations if it were not for the waterways? What else might have made the cities viable?
• How might the addition of a railroad have changed the uses and importance of water ways in these cities?
• How vital was water to the industrial and transportation needs of cities such as Pawtucket and Central Falls, Rhode Island, Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1871, Sandusky, Ohio, in about 1898, or San Francisco, California, about 1860? How vital were the industry and transportation capabilities of these cities to their existence?

7) Topography and History

While bird's-eye view maps are not topographical studies, they do provide a map reader with certain information about topography and land use. For instance, railways normally run through a city across a flat grade, as appears to be the case in Macon, Georgia, in 1887, South Bend, Indiana, in 1866, and Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1900. Yet, it is decidedly not the case in the Cripple Creek Mining District in Colorado. Given that exception to the rule, one might find it interesting to use panoramic maps and other materials to do a study of the topography of the Cripple Creek area, looking at the interaction of both physical and cultural elements.

Railroads had to bridge deep chasms and canyons to reach the Cripple Creek mining area. Serpentine roadbeds were built to support the railroad tracks. The winding path of the Florence & Cripple Creek line (the first railroad to reach the town of Cripple Creek) is visible on the map above. The principal mining camps of the Cripple Creek area were also reachable, at one time or another, via the Denver & Rio Grande Railroad, the Short Line Railroad, and the Midland Terminal Railway (a branch of the Colorado Midland Railway). It is said that during the height of the gold rush, Cripple Creek had as many assay offices (for analyzing ore) as grocery stores. After Cripple Creek burned to the ground in 1896, its many wood buildings were soon replaced by brick ones. The new town is shown in this 1896 map of the town of Cripple Creek.

Cripple Creek, Colorado, Phillips & Desjardins, Cartographers, Copyright 1896.

• Describe the land formations that surround Cripple Creek.
  
• Did miners work in streams, open pit mines, or undergound mines?
• Where did miners and others in the Cripple Creek district live? How did they spend or save their money?
• To what extent do you think that the land of Cripple Creek and its geological characteristics were responsible for making that city what it is today? How might the land have shaped the culture of Cripple Creek? What other factors might have shaped this town?
• To what extent do people and their activities impact the landscape and shape the culture of a place?
• While every inch of these maps may be worthy of study, are they meticulously drawn? Are there distortions? Would you use a panoramic map to build a railroad? To select a site for a factory, an office, a school, or a home? Why or why not?