Blairstown, Iowa, 1868 – Historic Map Reproduction
(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: Blairstown, Iowa, 1868, 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 Blairstown, Benton Co., Iowa 1868
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Blairstown, Iowa, 1868
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Blairstown, a small railroad town in Benton County, Iowa, was still young in 1868. It took its name from John I. Blair, the railroad financier whose lines pushed across Iowa after the Civil War and carried the region's corn, wheat, and hogs to eastern markets. Its depot and grain warehouses drew farm families who came in by wagon to buy goods and sell their harvests. Like many Iowa towns of the period, Blairstown measured its progress by new buildings on its streets and by the arrival of each train. Residents in 1868 would have known it as a railroad town whose fortunes rose and fell with the lines that served it.
| Created / published | 1868 |
|---|---|
| Creator | ruger, a., merchant's lithographing company |
| Notes | An original bird's-eye view map of Blairstown, Iowa, drawn in 1868. 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--Iowa |
| Source | Library of Congress, Panoramic Maps |
| Original scan | 3,872 × 2,984 px · prints to 13 × 10 in at 300 dpi |
| Library of Congress title | Bird's eye view of Blairstown, Benton Co., Iowa 1868 |
| Reference | AMZ-SOTP-OYK-488373 |
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