Paxton, Illinois, 1869 – Vintage Map Wall Art
(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: Paxton, Illinois, 1869, preserved in this antique map. It comes from the collections of the Library of Congress, scanned from the original and carefully restored.
Library of Congress record: Bird's eye view of the city of Paxton, Ford County, Illinois 1869
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Paxton, Illinois, 1869
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Paxton, Illinois, in 1869 was a young railroad town on the open prairie of Ford County, a few years past its founding in the mid-1850s. The Illinois Central line brought settlers, lumber, and goods in and carried grain and livestock out, so the depot, grain buildings, and freight yards were the center of local commerce. Farming on the surrounding prairie supported the stores, hotels, and shops that lined the main streets. Ford County had only recently been organized, and the town's civic life centered on the courthouse square and the churches and schools that a growing population was building. The lithograph shows those streets and blocks as residents knew them, with the railroad as the axis of town life.
| Created / published | 1869 |
|---|---|
| Creator | ruger, a., merchant's lithographing company |
| Notes | An original bird's-eye view map of Paxton, 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 | 6,816 × 5,552 px · prints to 23 × 19 in at 300 dpi |
| Library of Congress title | Bird's eye view of the city of Paxton, Ford County, Illinois 1869 |
| Reference | AMZ-SOTP-OYK-488598 |
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