Naperville, Illinois, 1869 – Antique Wall Map
(Originally scanned by the Library of Congress. Each image is professionally and digitally cleaned of artifacts such as color bars and extra borders prior to printing.)
Description
A window into the past: Naperville, Illinois, 1869, preserved in this antique map. An authentic image from the Library of Congress, it carries the weight of the real historical record.
Library of Congress record: Bird's eye view of Naperville, DuPage County, Illinois 1869
Framed, it is ready for the wall; unframed, it is ready for the frame you choose. Perfect for a home, office, library or classroom wall, and a gift with a story behind it. Free shipping in the lower 48 states. Since 2001, Snapshots of the Past has shipped historic prints to tens of thousands of customers around the world.
Naperville, Illinois, 1869
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Naperville, Illinois, in 1869 was a farm town of a few thousand people on the DuPage River, about thirty miles west of Chicago. Its founder, Joseph Naper, had settled the site in the early 1830s, and by the late 1860s the local economy rested on grain, livestock, and dairy farming in the surrounding prairie, with mills along the river processing much of the output. The Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad had reached the town in the mid-1860s, linking local farmers to Chicago markets and making the depot a center of commercial life. Churches, schools, and the young Naperville College, established by the Evangelical Association, gave the town a civic and religious character that residents often mentioned when describing their home. The bird's-eye view captures this compact community just as it was settling into the postwar years of railroad-driven growth.
| Created / published | 1869 |
|---|---|
| Creator | ruger & stoner, ruger, a., merchant's lithographing company |
| Notes | An original bird's-eye view map of Naperville, Illinois, drawn in 1869. Bird's-eye view maps were drawn by travelling artists who walked a town street by street, sketching every building from an imagined vantage point in the air, then sold the finished lithograph door to door by subscription. Roughly five thousand American towns were recorded this way between the 1860s and the 1920s, and for many of them the panoramic map is the most complete picture of the place that survives. Reproduced from the original in the Library of Congress collections. Printed to order on archival paper. Free shipping on all US orders. |
| Subjects | Panoramic maps--Illinois |
| Source | Library of Congress, Panoramic Maps |
| Original scan | 7,728 × 6,624 px · prints to 26 × 22 in at 300 dpi |
| Library of Congress title | Bird's eye view of Naperville, DuPage County, Illinois 1869 |
| Reference | AMZ-SOTP-OYK-488596 |
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