I’m Jim Akerman, Director of the Hermon Dunlap Smith Center for the History of Cartography at the Newberry Library here in Chicago. And today I’m discussing items in the Newberry’s collections that relate to the Picturing America School Collaboration Conference. We’ll be looking at a selection of maps and views and some photographs that all relate to the theme of the transformation of the landscape through technology, focusing specifically on transportation oriented technology.

The theme is inspired by the painting by Edward Hopper, House by the Railroad, dating from 1925, which shows a nineteenth-century farmhouse standing alone beside a railroad. It’s ambiguous in the picture whether the house has been abandoned or what its connection with the railroad is.

And this actually sets up some nice themes that are addressed in a series of maps and views that we will be seeing that convey this ambiguity about the importance of the railroad as it reaches out into rural communities, the transformation of rural communities into suburbs, and the economic disruptions as well as the disruption of the landscape that is associated with it.

The selection of items that we have in front of us today date from the 1870s until the arrival of the interstate in the 1950s and 1960s, and illustrate broadly some of the themes associated with American landscape and the way Americans envisioned it through commercial cartography and views—and to a certain extent through photography as Americans witnessed the transformation of the landscape associated with two industrial-era technologies, the railroad and the automobile.

We start with a view and map of a farm in Menard County, Illinois—that’s just northwest of the state capital, Springfield—published as part of a county land ownership atlas called The Illustrated Atlas of Menard County, Illinois. It very much reminds me of Edward Hopper’s painting, and if you look in fact at the little view that’s on the upper right-hand corner of the illustration you can see the depiction of the farm with the railroad running by it. The farmhouse is different in architectural style, but not unlike in situation that depicted in Edward Hopper’s painting.

We can see some hints of how the presence of the railroad is already transforming this area. There is a small brick schoolhouse in the lower right-hand corner of the image, not far from the railroad station and siding, which was in the process of being abandoned as a new school was being constructed that would serve a larger area, as transportation improvements and population growth were necessitating. So the era of the small one-room schoolhouse is already passing by at the time this image was made.

The next item is a map, a land ownership map, rather than a view this time, from another county land ownership atlas, also from Illinois—and of the same date. This is from the Combination Atlas Map of Du Page County. Du Page County is a suburban county of Chicago, then largely rural but in the process, as we can see on this map, of undergoing some early stages of suburbanization. And though we often associate suburbanization with the automobile in the twentieth century, we can see similar processes going on in the nineteenth century associated with the railroad.

Chicago’s position as a major importer and exporter of grain and agricultural products, and its position as a railroad hub for much of the northern part of the country, gave it a dense network of rail lines radiating from the city in virtually every direction. That began to grow in the 1850s, and expanded rapidly in the 1860s, 1870s, and early 1880s.

These rail lines radiating from the city also became the conduits by which suburbanization could take place, and what we are seeing in Downers Grove township here is a rail line, in this case main line of the Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy Railroad.

When it was learned that the railroad would be coming through this area, speculators platted out towns or expanded existing towns that would straddle the railroad in the hope that they would make a killing in real estate. And, in fact, this is what they mostly succeeded in doing, transforming these smaller rural towns that are strung out along the plank road into residential suburbs for which the railroad provided a rapid and fairly easy communication with jobs at the center of the city.

So what we are seeing here is still a predominantly rural landscape, very much like what we saw with Jonathan Miller’s farm but it is a rural landscape that is being transformed into something entirely different that we associate with the later nineteenth century and with the twentieth century and the rise of the modern suburbs. [This is] another suggestion of the ambiguity of the relationship between railroads and rural communities suggested by Hopper’s painting.

This next item, which comes from the early automobile era, offers a nice glimpse of American rural and small-town landscapes at the moment that the automobile was just developing as a means of travel between cities. It dates from 1905 and was published by a Chicago-based automobile dealer named H. Sargent Michaels. This is before the arrival of the Model T and automobile use was still largely something of a privilege, something largely available to wealthier, more privileged classes.

The publication is part of a series that Michaels developed that were later called “photo auto guides.” They show through a series of photographs how one might travel from a city such as Chicago to another city such as Milwaukee, or in this case Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, which was a major resort area for Chicagoans in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth century.

The photo auto guides worked rather like modern in-car navigation systems, by giving very explicit directions where to turn and which direction to turn at various intervals along the route. They used the photographs as the means to help people recognize where they were, and to orient themselves. But, as a result of that we have a series of pictures, in this case along the route from Chicago to Lake Geneva, that gives us a glimpse of farmhouses, small communities and crossroads in a rural America that was still out of the reach for most travelers, at a time when the automobile was beginning to transform the relationship between these places and the larger country.

This next image is a cover of a road map published by Rand McNally for the Colonial Beacon Oil Company.

Colonial Beacon reinforced its association with the colonial heritage of New England by designing its service stations using motifs drawn from the Massachusetts statehouse, which is on Beacon Hill in Boston. So there were columns and a lantern on the top of their gas stations that were developed in the 1920s.

Of course the notion of a beacon has some interesting connections that I think are rather nicely caught by this cover art, where we see a city at the far lower right of the map, presumably Boston, with a beacon that seems to be shining out into the surrounding countryside.

But also, the rays of light that appear to be coming from this Beacon are not rays of light, in fact, but roads that are connecting the metropolis of Boston to rural communities and small towns throughout New England. They come from a time, in this case 1930, when the automobile is being promoted as a way of connecting rural and urban communities. And although one has the sense from this image that it is the urban community which is the dominant force, we gain a sense of a broader automobile-oriented landscape where city and small town and farm are well connected.

In the 1930s—that is about the same time that oil companies were embracing the use of free roadmaps as a means of promoting their products and services—the airline industry was in its infancy in the United States.

The company that became United Airlines in the 1930s was a pioneer of regularly scheduled passenger service. And airline companies began to issue maps not only to promote their routes but also to entertain their passengers.

United Airlines was built up as a national airline by connecting a series of old postal air routes from coast to coast, which it called its “main line.” It’s interesting that these maps from the 1930s and 1940s and even 1950s look quite different from the maps that were distributed to airline passengers in the later 50s, 60s, and 70s. These maps were quite large in scale and have quite a lot of information about the landscape one was flying above.

Part of the reason for this was the fact that propeller aircraft could not fly the altitudes that jet aircraft made possible in the 1950s and 1960s. So the airline passenger, if they dared to look out the window, had a much more intimate relationship with the landscape below.

So this booklet has made out of this necessity of staying close to ground a source of diversion or entertainment for its passengers by pointing out landmarks that could be seen from below. In this case we are looking at the stretch of the route between Chicago and Cleveland. And we are seeing aerial views much like one might have seen from these airplanes.

The last two images we are going to look at are two sides of a map that was published in 1964 by the Portland Cement Association. The map is one of several that one finds from the late 1950s and early 1960s that were promoting and celebrating the creation of the interstate highway system. The interstate highway system eventually grew to comprise more than 40,000 miles and has been called by some the largest public works project in history. And indeed the social impact and the impact on the landscape of the interstate highway system is profound and playing itself out every day in the twenty-first century.

One could argue that no technological development—certainly those associated with transportation—has had a more profound effect on the landscape of the United States as we know it today than the interstate highway system.

On one side of the map is a simple description of the full extent of the system as it was then envisioned.

Perhaps more interesting is the other side of the map—we have a series of ten images of different landscapes associated with the interstate highway system from various parts of the country. And what is striking about them is not that they give much sense of the countryside beside them, but how much emphasis there is on the road itself. And if you look at several of these—for example, one showing an interchange in Los Angeles, or this one showing a portion of highway running through Cleveland, Ohio—it’s very difficult to see the details of the landscape that seem to be overwhelmed by the construction of the interstate highway.

In the interest of increasing the speed of automobile travel, interstate highways in effect isolated themselves from the landscape through which they passed.

This map captures none of the cynicism that we associate with the interstate highway system that began to emerge as people understood its role in contributing to the decline of inner cities, in some case the destruction of inner city urban neighborhoods. In the early 1960s, as this map shows, there is a tremendous amount of enthusiasm for the technology itself.

So perhaps it’s fitting that the vignettes focus not so much on the surrounding countryside, but seem fascinated with the construction of viaducts and of cloverleaf interchanges and convey a sense of the speed and ease with which travel is promoted by the interstate.

I think it comes back again to this ambiguity we saw in Hopper’s painting. It’s not clear whether the railroad is part of the landscape of the house, whether it’s contributing to the decline of the rural landscape or whether it’s a part of the landscape.

SLIDE LIST

1. "Pictorial Map of the 130 Acre Farm of Jonathan Miller, on West half of section 36, Township 18, Range 6, Northwest suburbs of Athens, Menard Co., Illinois." Illustrated Atlas of Menard County, Illinois (Edwardsville, IL: W. R. Brink & Co., 1874). +F896565.43.

2. "Map of Downer's Grove Township," Combination Atlas Map of Du Page County (Elgin: Thompson Bro's & Burr, 1874). The Newberry Library. Folio F 89628 .188

3. H. Sargent Michaels, Chicago to Lake Geneva, Lake Geneva to Delavan, Delavan to Beloit : returning from Lake Geneva via Channel Lake, Lake Catherine, Lake Marie, Antioch, Loon Lake, Cedar Lake, Deep Lake, Lake Villa, Grays Lake, Libertyville, Half Day and Highland Park (Chicago: H. Sargent Michaels Co., 1905).Case GV1024 .C44 1905

4. Cover art of city and radiating highways (3 panels), Colonial Beacon Road Map (Chicago: Rand McNally for Colonial Beacon Oil Co., 1930). Rand McNally Collection

5. United Air Lines Maps of the Main Line Airway (Chicago: Rand McNally for United Airlines, 1943).  RMcN Atlas U49 1943

6. The National System of Interstate and Defense Highways (Convent Station, NJ: General Drafting Company for the Portland Cement Association, 1964). Map 6F G3701.P2 1964 P6