Bird's Eye View Maps

A bird's eye view map shows a town from a point in the air that nobody could actually reach. The artist made it up. And yet the buildings are usually right, down to the number of windows on the courthouse.

These maps were an American craze from roughly the 1860s through the 1920s. Itinerant artists traveled from town to town, walked every street with a sketchbook, and then worked the whole place up into a single view, tilted as if seen from a hilltop or a balloon a few thousand feet up. Albert Ruger, Thaddeus Mortimer Fowler, Oakley Bailey and Henry Wellge were among the busiest, and between them they drew hundreds of places, many of them towns of a few hundred people.

The business ran on local pride. A view was usually sold by subscription before it was printed, often with the help of the chamber of commerce or the town's leading merchants. Residents bought copies to hang in the parlor. Boosters sent them to investors back East to show that their town was a real place with a future.

That explains what the maps tend to show. Factory chimneys are always smoking. The rail yard is full. There are steamboats on the river and trains on every line. Churches, schools, the opera house and the new hotel are numbered and listed in a key along the bottom margin, along with the businesses that paid to be included. Some views carry small vignettes of important buildings around the border.

The thing worth noticing is the edge of town. Look past the business district and you will often see empty lots laid out in a grid, streets named and drawn in with nothing on them yet. That was the hope. Comparing two views of the same town drawn 20 years apart shows which hopes came true. For anyone researching a family house or a vanished downtown, these maps are often the only picture of the whole place as it stood.