Panoramic Maps

A panoramic map shows a town the way a bird would see it, from high up and off at an angle, with every street, house, church steeple and factory chimney drawn in. The striking thing is that almost none of the artists who made them had ever seen a town from that height. They built the view on paper.

The method was patient and practical. An artist walked the streets with a sketchbook, drawing buildings one by one and noting the layout from the town's street plan. Back at the drawing table, he worked out the perspective as if looking down from a point in the sky that he never actually visited. The finished drawing was then printed by lithography, often with hand coloring.

These maps were a big business between the 1860s and the 1920s. A small group of artists made most of them and traveled constantly from town to town. Albert Ruger was one of the first and drew hundreds of towns after the Civil War. Thaddeus Mortimer Fowler worked for decades, much of it in Pennsylvania. Oakley H. Bailey drew towns across New England and beyond. Their maps were usually sold by subscription to local residents and businesses, who wanted a picture of their town to hang in the parlor or the office.

That sales method explains a lot about how the maps look. They were made to show a town at its best. Smoke rises from every factory, trains run on every track, and steamboats crowd the river, because all of those meant jobs and prosperity. The borders are often lined with small pictures of local businesses and fine homes, whose owners had paid to be included.

The maps here are arranged by state, with a section of cities abroad. Look for your own town if you can find it, then try to match old streets to the present. The accuracy is often remarkable, down to individual houses. Many of these maps are the best record anywhere of what a 19th-century American town actually looked like from end to end.