Getting Places in the Old Midwest

Somewhere Bill Bryson writes that Midwesterners are never happier than when they're arguing over how to get from point A to point B. But it's easy to forget how recent is our ability even to do that!

Juliette Kinzie's Wau-Bun: The "Early Day" in the North-west recounts more than one trip between central Wisconsin and Chicago in the early 1830s where their party spent significant time being completely lost, no cabins in sight, and low on food.

My son's new compilation of Selected Readings on the Life and Work of Frances Ann Wood Shimer includes her tales of travel to Mount Carroll (Carroll County), Illinois in the early 1850s, when the train west of Milwaukee stopped at Janesville, and nobody in Freeport seemed to know even where Mount Carroll was!

Travelers' accounts are valuable supplements to history, among other things because they mention facts that we want to know but the residents just took for granted.



Harold Henderson, "Getting Places in the Old Midwest," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 28 January 2013 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Outline maps for counties

The inimitable Bill Bryson ("I come from Des Moines. Somebody had to.") explains how important directions are to Midwesterners.

"Any story related by a Midwesterner will wander off at some point into a thicket of interior monologue along the lines of 'We were staying at a hotel that was eight blocks northeast of the state capitol building. Come to think of it, it was northwest. And I think it was probably more like nine blocks.'" (The Lost Continent, page 15)

In that spirit I was delighted to find Genealogy Miscellanea flagging the National Atlas website as an excellent source of free printable county maps for all states. It reminded me of another, more obscure site offering a variety of free maps: geology.com. For Illinois (and every other state AFAIK), geology.com offers

(1) county outlines (no names or towns) on a physical map of the state,
(2) county outlines with elevations (not much of that in Illinois),
(3) county outlines with major highways,
(4) county outlines with major highways and a good sprinkling of towns,
(5) county outlines and names with lakes and rivers,
(6) county outlines and names in color,
(7) county outlines and names and county seats in color.

Now, can anyone suggest a site that has a township map for each and every county in the US?