Might be worth checking out the catalogue of the Illinois State Library or the Chicago Public Library. A branch office of Rand McNally was also opened in New York City (1894) according to Wikipedia, and it's possible that an old copy could be in some archive there as well.
@JonBerry555 and not just Peoria itself but also surrounding communities. At a bare minimum, Peoria Heights, East Peoria, and Pekin all have public libraries as well. They almost certainly would have been featured even in an experimental map of Peoria in 1917.
Large state seat libraries would be the most likely places to have historic maps like that, because they'd be useful in comparing historic land borders or surveys. So if there's not a copy in Peoria then either Springfield or Chicago would be the best places to find a copy.
Nah, I’m pretty rubbish at research. I tend to give up if the thing I’m looking for doesn’t turn up after about 3 minutes of googling. But thanks for thinking of us though! :)
I worked for years at the UCLA map library and can tell you that folded road maps were rarely archived, and those that were often remain undigitized and even uncataloged. They were usually treated as "ephemera", too numerous, fragile, and awkward to collect and preserve by normal methods. So you're right, this could be a time-consuming or fruitless search. Your best bet is to contact a specialist map librarian at a major university. They can recommend the most likely map libraries to check. If you're really lucky, they may be willing to post your question to one of the internal communication channels used by map librarians.
So I did so research and found some interesting answers. It is debated whether J Brink really was the first to devise the idea of numbered highways. This claim is made in his memoirs (preserved in the Newberry library) and in newspaper interviews he made (e.g. Chicago Tribune, 1924). This identifies 1916 as the origin of the concept and late 1917 (Plaiss, 2012) as the first publication date of this type of Auto Trail Map. However, named highway routings pre-date this. I was able to find references to routings named 'Yellowstone Trail', 'Blazed Trail', etc in earlier maps. The innovation appears to be twofold - numbers rather than names and signs denoting the numbers en-route. The 1917 edition of Auto Trails for the state of Illinois does not bear the numberings - I could find this online with relative ease. It still only has unlabelled black lines connecting towns. The 1918 version, however, does have the numbered highway routings. Discussion in the paper mentioned in Emperor Tigerstar's video suggests that the initial 1917 maps were 'experimental', which suggests that they may not have been widely published and may not be part of the official Auto Trails series of maps. Possibly debunking the myth, Wisconsin began a state-sponsored initiative to improve highways in 1916. The funding for this produced a map in 1917 with numbered highway routes. It is not clear if this map pre-dates the Brink map or whether the signs were erected concurrently. From the literature, it is clear that when producing an Auto Trails map for Wisconsin in 1918 they used a different numbering system and the proliferation of different numbering systems from public and private bodies (even when referring to the same route) led to the national highways numbering system in the mid-1920s.
Hey Tigerstar I suggest you go contact the lost media wiki the people there probably have more experience finding missing history than you do not to mention the benefits of spreading the search to a whole community. P.S do you have any of your lost alt history videos you have uploaded some to a secondary channel but I think there's more. Have them be unlisted if you want for history's sake.
PennDOT had numbered highways in 1916 and put out a map with it, which is preserved on their website for some counties, including Schuylkill County. 1917 would not have been the first numbered highway map in the U.S.
A company not knowing its History isn't terribly surprising Crayola crayons and was able to find information about their catalog history that Crayola itself did not know because they never thought it was important. And so their history basically starts with whatever they could confirm
There are also loads of amateur map collectors out there, surely if it was at least not that uncommon, it should exist in someone's collection. Especially if it was this pivotal in the numbering systems, it should be known in their community and thus motivate collecting it more than an average tourist map from the era.
Also, there may be copies in personal collections. I have a moderate map collection but it's diminished due to age and lack of interest on my part. Obviously, trying to find private collections would be an impossible task. But, one thing that you might want to try is estate sales. If the estate sale is online (particularly if it's an auction.), items like this may appear. These may be blink and you miss it moments. But, it might work to do a periodic search like once a month to see if you can stumble across it.
The history page on the Rand McNally site was caught by Yandex Web Cache, so you can still see it. But this quote is all it has to say on the topic and there is no further source cited. "1917 - On a map of Peoria, Illinois, the company debuts a new highway numbering system that will become the model for the system used across the United States today."
They can put whatever they want on their Website but that's a demonstrative false statement. First, Peoria is a city, not a region or state so any highway numbering wouldn't do any good. Second, other regions had numbering schemes prior to 1917. Third, the need for a highway numbering scheme came from the states, not a map company. They wanted a national system, not named highways. No where in the report about the numbering scheme does it mention Rand McNally as the source of their numbering scheme.
After a bit of rabbit-hole exploration, I think I have some useful info. According to the Newberry Library's online *catalog*, they DO have a 1917 Auto Trails Map in their Rand McNally Collection (Call No.: "RMcN Auto Trails 6F 42.5"). It's titled, "Rand McNally Official Auto Trails Map: Southern Wisconsin, Northern Illinois." According to the catalog record, the Newberry describes this as the "First map issued in Rand McNally's 'Auto Trails' series of regional road maps." HOWEVER, I do not think this is actually true based on what else I've found. The Library of Congress's "Catalog of Copyright Entries" (for 1917) lists this map as having been published July 6, 1917. In late June 1917, however, Rand McNally & Co. published what I believe to be the legitimately first map of the "Auto Trails Map" series. It's called the "Rand McNally Official Auto Trails Map, District No. 1: Illinois, Western Indiana, S.E. Iowa, N.E. Missouri." Apparently multiple versions of this one at slightly different scales were copyrighted separately, with two dated June 20th and one June 16th. And to support that this was the first one, there are a few contemporary newspaper articles that I found via the University of Illinois's Digital Newspaper Collections that all point to this. Most significant is an article in the Free Trade-Journal (Ottawa, IL), 18 June, 1917, which announces the recent publication of the map and hailing it as the "first official auto trail map in which all the organized trails of the state are included." It's also clearly this District No. 1 map and not the more limited map, since it explicitly states it covers District No. 1, comprising ALL of Illinois and parts of the adjacent states. It make no mention of preceding works and clearly seems to give the impression that the nature of the map is novel. Likewise, there are a few other articles in various local papers (mostly in April 1917) mentioning and hyping up the ongoing efforts to expand trails and gather info on trail routes in preparation for an ambiguous map or maps to be published by Rand McNally & Co. (As a side note, in these articles a local automobile figure, "A. E. Nissen," associating with Rand McNally, features prominently, even so far as saying in the June 18th article that this first map was prepared under his direction. Maybe he was essentially operating directly under Brink in the Auto Trails Map department of the company?) Not sure what purpose the southern Wisconsin & northern Illinois map published shortly afterwards served. It could just be that they had a lot of Chicago-based automobile-related companies (and their customers) that they could tailor to as a specialized market for a more narrowly defined map? The major "District" maps of the series appear to have been the flagship publications, covering their respective, non-overlapping regions. Meanwhile they published these one-off maps, usually for individual states. All this being said, both maps (or at the least, the District No. 1 map) seem to cover an area that would likely include Peoria, IL. It doesn't seem far-fetched to me that one of these are the "1917 Peoria Map." Based on other "Auto Trails" maps published in the following years, Peoria seemed to be one of the cities in Illinois that was a major hub for the auto trails, so maybe that brought extra attention to it in the eyes of initial researchers or historians? In one of the newspaper articles, it is made to seem like Rand McNally & Co.'s efforts were going towards simply making a county map for that paper's home county. Maybe a similar instance happened in a Peoria newspaper, and a later company historian just happened to stumble into that article, jumped to conclusions, and ran with that story? Aside from those, I also found in Peoria Public Library's online catalog that they have a Business/Landowner's Directory for Peoria & Tazwell Counties, Illinois (Call No.: "917.735 BUS"), published in 1916, and curiously enough, by Rand McNally & Co. The reason I bring this up is that often directories arrange for the inclusion of a local map of the city or locale that they cover for reference purposes. So it's possible that this idea of a "Peoria Map" being trialed beforehand does exist, but it was just included as supplementary material within another publication instead of as a standalone map. The publication year is not 1917, but it might even make more sense if it was published earlier in 1916, considering Brink supposedly promoted the system in 1916 as well as there being an already substantial proliferation of these auto trails by automobile clubs and boosters in the buildup to 1917. The Illinois Digital Archives has a set of maps from the Illinois State Library that they have digitized in a collection called, "Illinois State Highway Maps," and the earliest map in it is a map prepared by the Illinois State Highway Department and dated to 1 February, 1917. It shows a legend of auto trails in the state at that time with rough illustrations of the signs used to demarcate them (just as Rand McNally do, but without keying them to numbers), so clearly this marking of trails with signs with specific symbols and patterns was already substantial by February 1917. But at the same time, the map also seems to show that the system is rapidly expanding since many of the trails have yet to adopt unique signs, and there seem to have been a few more very recently added late in preparation of the map as they are listed at the end, out of alphabetical order. This probably shows how Rand McNally was to some degree pushing things along, and that they already had been helping establish trails and signage in 1916, going into 1917. Peoria Public Library (and probably other places) also has the normal yearly "Leshnick's Peoria City Directories," so that could be another possibility for containing a local Peoria map. There might also be some information about local publications like these, containing maps, in newspapers local to Peoria, if someone had access to them. I was going to wrap it up there without having found any image of these initial 1917 Auto Trails Maps: the southern WI, northern IL map in the Newberry not being digitized, and there being seemingly no record of the 1917 District No. 1 map anywhere. But then your comment, "of course, Google has been rather terrible with it's search engine lately," popped into my mind, and I went out on a whim and decided to search using Bing, and LO AND BEHOLD. (By the way, I was laughing to myself after this.) Among the first returns were for a site called WorthPoint, which I guess is designed for monitoring online auctions and marketplaces like eBay to track individual items but all in one place? Not sure how big or useful they are. Anyway, they seem to have sales and listings from places like eBay, and even after they seem to be taken down on eBay, so they kind of archive listings, which is why I couldn't find anything on eBay after trying to look them up; and additionally, for whatever reason, these pages are not showing up on the results for Google. WorthPoint has FIVE individual listings/sales (that I could find), originally from eBay, for the earlier 1917 "Rand McNally Official Auto Trails Map, District No. 1" and they do actually include photos of the map. Most of them are not high enough resolution to really make use of for information, but some show a corner in high enough resolution, and you can clearly get a general understanding of the features of the map. It does show notable differences to all of the subsequent Auto Trails maps, which convinces me more that this was definitely the first map: 1) the trail numbers are dark text in white boxes, instead of white text in dark boxes; 2) the legend is running along the top margin, above the map, and not down one of the sides; and 3) the signs for the trails themselves are not simply presented as rectangles, they are actually depicted wrapping around a cross-section of a wood pole. You can easily find these just by searching on WorthPoint for "1917 auto trails map" (not in quotes, but as separate keywords). Obviously, these earliest maps do exist, at least in private hands. On WorthPoint, the sales information for each item is hidden unless you make an account, so I didn't bother to look further into by whom and when these maps were sold (but someone probably could easily if they wanted to). I wouldn't be surprised if there were more in public collections. They probably are in at least a few places like local historical societies and archives, but just treated as generic ephemeral materials and not archived or cataloged separately yet.
A simple search for "Auto Trails Map 1917" found this item. If you are looking for archives and don't know about OCLC's Worldcat product, a lot of librarians will be AWFULLY SAD... But then again, librarians aren't the greatest for reminding people about their jobs and what people can get help with if they ask.
If the map was copyrighted then it should in the Library of Congress. I did a quick search and got no hits on a Peoria map. I did get results for a Texas, California and Philadelphia "new road atlas" all with a 1917 pub. date. The maps are not digitized but are available to view in the Map Reading Room in the Madison building.
8:17 -- For almost a decade I was the Reference Archivist at a major institution. Many times I have had to explain to people that not every single document gets preserved. It is just not possible to save everything. As for maps, that was not my area of expertise, but I can concur that things like road maps (and municipal transit maps) were less likely to be preserved than official things produced by government. If nothing else, these types of maps get damaged and worn-out from use and/or they are superseded by newer editions and disposed of. My own set of road maps gets "refreshed" from time to time.
On the other hand some map companies do archive every map they ever printed - Melways directories in Australia for example have all their annually updated street maps, from their very first, online.
I put the old RM URL into the Wayback Machine and there's not much on that old page. It's basically a less-sophisticated version of the current timeline. The entry for 1917 says simply "On a map of Peoria, Illinois, the company debuts a new highway numbering system that will become the model for the system used across the United States today." It also looks like eBay has all kinds of RM maps from 1917, including Illinois, in the $40 range.
There are a few maps on eBay listed as 1917 Rand McNally, including one for Illinois. Can’t confirm the authenticity or accuracy of the listings, but you can have eBay monitor search criteria indefinitely and notify if something specific is listed. Video was very good and interesting. Thanks for that.
Don't email big companies. You usuall don't get very far that way. Try to find a phone number (bonus points if it's not the main customer service line) or visit in person.
4:54 - so, it is not just me... I thought that I'm doing something wrong with my searches... I used to find things I wanted to in seconds, now it's many, many minutes, if ever...
Deja Google went bonkers first, like 20 years ago. When they acquired Deja News (a Usenet archive), they kept it up in good shape for just a few years, then very suddenly turned it to seeming randomness. This year Google finally stopped updating that archive at all.
what a fascinating story and map mystery. crazy to think how many things are sitting in archives, not uploaded to the internet, nearly impossible to find
Companies are also not the best archivists, since that's not their purpose; they have every incentive to claim such a map exists, but that doesn't mean the claim is accurate (not necessarily that they're lying, but it could be a chain of hearsay and misunderstanding and clerical errors)
Some more things to try to find that map, though you may have thought of them. - Library of Congress - Smithsonian - state of IL and Peoria historical societies - archivists and collectors who specialize in maps - instead of just sending an email, get the name of the library or association's archivist and get them a call. Your personal inquiry may get a faster and more in-depth search going Nice stuff, good luck
Please continue to delve deeply into the history of everything - In particular maps. Ever since I was taught as a young child by my civil engineer father to read a contour map, I have been fascinated by maps.
"3. No more copies exist" - A very real possibility. Consider Frank Capra's 1937 movie "Lost Horizon" (an ironic title for sure) that has no complete prints remaining. It was nominated for several Oscars including Best Picture, and won two technical awards, yet all we have now is a Frankenstein restoration pieced together from different versions, that substitutes 7 minutes of missing footage with photo stills.
Could be in some random persons attic or something. It’s wild the kinda things that pop up in peoples attics. In 2018 a photo of Rommel shaking hands with the guy who was agreed by the July 20th plotters to take power after the attack had it succeeded was found in someone’s attic
If you haven't tried these yet, and they are admittedly long shots, but contact the Public Library in Peoria and perhaps the library at Bradley University in Peoria.
It wouldn't surprise me if it turned out that no more copies exist. I have a collection of (mostly) gas station maps of various states/areas, and some of the oldest dating to merely the 1950s are so fragile I'm afraid to unfold them.
Maybe they drafted a map in 1917 that they broadly liked but which had various revisions made to it before being published generally in 1918. If so, the "original" may not have existed even 100+ years ago.
Something related to number 2: they didn’t consider it important so someone from the company took it rather than have it end up in the trash. Also the company could have given it to John Brink as a memento.
Did you try emailing the academic who wrote that 12-page paper? I find they are often quite helpful when someone shows an interest in their research passions.
Have you tried the Peoria library or historical society? I have done a a lot of historical research on different subjects, including for my M.A. & Ph.D. That was all done B.I. (Before Internet). Even today I far prefer visiting an archive than merely checking online. Whatever you may think and an archive may tell you, huge swatchs of material have not been scanned or even cataloged. The rules that I follow for visits are start with the largest repositories on the subject, then jump scale to the most local. Also check with official state archives--again visits are better. It's vitally important to network with archivists and librarians and get them thinking about complimentary sources.
If I were still living in New York City, this video might get me to try the New York Public Library for it. At least one collection the Research Library Annex had was more complete than that of the organization that originated the serial in question, and if I were researching a lot of other things I probably would've found that to be the case for many others.
That the Newberry Library can't find that map doesn't mean they don't have it--they've got lots of boxes of donated material still uncatalogued. As of ~15 years ago there was still a McNally on their board. If you can track him down, you might ask him about it.
From what I can tell this particular map was not a standalone map, but was part of the Rand McNally 1917 Illinois Pocket Index map. Which, from what I can tell, hasn't been digitized, hence the lack of an online capture of the map being available.
Don't know how big the Newbury's map collection is, but both the University of Illinois at Urbana and Western Illinois University (near Peoria) have large and extensive map collections in their map libraries. I've visited both and much of their collection is not be digitized. Email and/or phone calls to their librarians would let you know if a 1917 Peoria road map was in their collection.
From my own relatively limited research around the auto trails and the Lincoln highway and Arrowhead highway in particular it seems that people were still calling the old routes by their boosterism and association names, where they existed, as late as at least the early 20s, at least from books from the time that I've read like Family Flivvers to Frisco. A few old maps have numbers to reference to the roads with their actual names on a key but from what I've seen and from my own digging through guidebooks and maps those numbers don't correspond to the ones used when the federal government actually created the numbered roads (US-50, US-66 etc) as we know them today in the late 20s that replaced the earlier private/state system of auto trails. I'd love to be corrected on this though
I was partial to H.M. Gousha maps, and I still use them, although they are no longer available. I would rather use an old paper map than an online map. Ironically, HMG was sold to Rand McNally in 1996.
Internet Archive shows that the randmcnally history url (with three w's) made the claim "1917 On a map of Peoria, Illinois, the company debuts a new highway numbering system that will become the model for the system used across the United States today" until at least July 2023. By September it had been redesigned to the current version, though the text of the bullet points doesn't seem to have been captured.
Hey emperor tigerstar can you do that clash between china and india in 2020 where in total 24 people died; 4 chinese and 20 indians? It can still be considered a war.
I wonder if the timing of the release has anything to do with it… 1917 was before WWI and the Spanish Flu Epidemic, maybe some things needing to being reused during that time and were documented in the chaos.
As some people have said already, I would try to search for historical societies, libraries, etc. from Peoria itself or surrounding area (or at the very least, focused in Illinois).
A couple of comments mentioned the Library of Congress. I believet they are suppose to receive a copy of every copywrighted publication. Assuming it was copywrighted, they should have it. Another possible source might be the US Geologic Survey. It's possible they may have used it as a source.
Trace the reference, not the map. This reminds me of an issue I ran into regarding a story about Robert Louis Stevenson arriving in Monterey. Something about the story didn't ring true to me so I started tracing the reference only to discover that it was a circular reference. Book A references Book B, Book B references Book C, Book C references Book A... When I finally broke free of the loop I discovered that the citations had all originated from a fictional account based on second hand recollections and hearsay. People doing bad research and filling in blanks with assumptions was another issue I often ran into. Bottom line, if it can't be traced, it might not have existed in the first place. One possible way to find out if it did would be to research whether or not the claims have any validity. Before federal standardization highways were marked by private organizations. The "Auto Trails" system. Rand McNally wasn't the only one putting up signs to mark roads.
I notice a lot of librarians commenting on this one, and why none of them offered up OCLC's Worldcat product is beyond me. And ep, there it is with a simple search "Auto Trails Map 1917." One result. I bet that's it.
Rand McNally didn't invent numbered roads & they didn't write the Wikipedia article that you were citing. The article clearly states that one of it's cartographers invented A system that was published in 1917 and it was of Peoria, IL. It doesn't mean that road system was transformative. It was just a system, not THE system. That would explain why it's not on Rand McNally's Website history and the fact that you can't find the map elsewhere. BTW, I would email historians in Peoria to see if they have a map. Also, there's no reference for that sentence. Without a reference, it's not a verifiable fact. Named roads existed nearly a decade earlier, like the Lincoln Highway. New England had a numbered road system prior to 1917 and many of those roads still use those same numbers. Prior to the 1926 numbering system, these auto trails connected places and while regional and national in scope, they were private organizations and it created a Hodge Podge system. States came to an agreement with a numbering system by 1926 and that system took over the named auto trails. The auto trails would continue as a marketing system but Fisher's 1912 vision for improved roads and the construction of the coast to coast Lincoln Highway served its purpose. With a numbering system in place, travelers were free to roam about the country and the American road trip was born. Rand McNally was simply printing maps with a numbering system that was in place, not something that they came up with. There's a whole Wikipedia article on the United States Numbered Highway System and you can read more of the history there.
Like to back up some to the railroad part of Rand-McNally. In 1978 I had loaned a RN easter US map at the local library, to study the area of Rangeley Lakes as a SR&RL enthusiast. Always been tinkering with maps, but was to create a freestanding 2-foot rwy idea after articles in some model magazines, primarily the Narrow Gauge Gazette. Anyway, a bit northwest of Rangely, I found a small winding forest road up to Kennebago Lake, being an inspiration for my own rwy kingdom. In the late 1990s with first MapQuest and later Google Maps, I followed my imaginary rwy along a perfect Right of Way. Then, in 2006, I found a German narrow-gauge wiki, listing my little rwy as a part of Maine Central 1905-15. Think of what ideas a RN map could spawn, Google Maps is not the same, just bland. I bought the particular map in the 1980s when having my first salary; Rand-Mcnally maps was really dream catchers.
I found an old map of East Germany that i don't know how to preserve? O reversed image searched it and couldnt find anything like it so id like to digitize it. I dont have a photocopeier big enough for it. Can i just go to some random library for help or what can i do?
Why must some maps be hard to find?
To make the job harder?
I believe the University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee has a huge archive of historical maps, they may have it in their records.
so true king
5. It might be in possession of a private collector, including family descendants
(who also covered tracks on its provenance)
Ebay has one for sale . I tried to send the link it won't go
Sounds like Emperor Tigerstar needs to team up with CGP Grey and the Map Men to hunt down the fabled 1917 Rand McNally Blazing Trails Map.
Yes please!
Time to get CGP Grey to pursue this wild goose chase.
Don’t give him anymore pain…or ideas…
@@Angelblue1302those videos are some of his best tho
@@skysthelimitvideos True.
*skyward scream* DISOSWAY!!!
That guy is a clown who tried to get Vlogging Through History shut down
Might be worth checking out the catalogue of the Illinois State Library or the Chicago Public Library. A branch office of Rand McNally was also opened in New York City (1894) according to Wikipedia, and it's possible that an old copy could be in some archive there as well.
Additionally it may be worth checking out libraries and museums in Peoria, IL.
@JonBerry555 and not just Peoria itself but also surrounding communities. At a bare minimum, Peoria Heights, East Peoria, and Pekin all have public libraries as well. They almost certainly would have been featured even in an experimental map of Peoria in 1917.
Large state seat libraries would be the most likely places to have historic maps like that, because they'd be useful in comparing historic land borders or surveys. So if there's not a copy in Peoria then either Springfield or Chicago would be the best places to find a copy.
@@VulpesHilarianus or possibly the University of Illinois library in Champaign-Urbana
Bradley University is in Peoria. There might be something in their library.
I’d try emailing the Peoria Historical society
this
Or Peoria library
Library of Congress? That supposedly has a copy of everything ever published in the U.S.
Good luck, Peoria is a dump.
- a native Peoria Resident
@@katieandkevinsears7724
That sounds like the best idea.
🚗🙂
We need a Map Men video about this map!
Map cat, map cat, map map map cat cat
Map men, map men, map map map men men.
Map sheep, map sheep, map map map sheep cat
Nah, I’m pretty rubbish at research. I tend to give up if the thing I’m looking for doesn’t turn up after about 3 minutes of googling. But thanks for thinking of us though! :)
@@JayForeman Ah well, it was worth the attempt.
I worked for years at the UCLA map library and can tell you that folded road maps were rarely archived, and those that were often remain undigitized and even uncataloged. They were usually treated as "ephemera", too numerous, fragile, and awkward to collect and preserve by normal methods. So you're right, this could be a time-consuming or fruitless search. Your best bet is to contact a specialist map librarian at a major university. They can recommend the most likely map libraries to check. If you're really lucky, they may be willing to post your question to one of the internal communication channels used by map librarians.
that's a fascinating insight, thank you
Search Worldcat
So emperor Tigerstar just had a CCP grey moment
Wut
Hexagon Credit -99999
So I did so research and found some interesting answers.
It is debated whether J Brink really was the first to devise the idea of numbered highways. This claim is made in his memoirs (preserved in the Newberry library) and in newspaper interviews he made (e.g. Chicago Tribune, 1924). This identifies 1916 as the origin of the concept and late 1917 (Plaiss, 2012) as the first publication date of this type of Auto Trail Map.
However, named highway routings pre-date this. I was able to find references to routings named 'Yellowstone Trail', 'Blazed Trail', etc in earlier maps. The innovation appears to be twofold - numbers rather than names and signs denoting the numbers en-route.
The 1917 edition of Auto Trails for the state of Illinois does not bear the numberings - I could find this online with relative ease. It still only has unlabelled black lines connecting towns. The 1918 version, however, does have the numbered highway routings. Discussion in the paper mentioned in Emperor Tigerstar's video suggests that the initial 1917 maps were 'experimental', which suggests that they may not have been widely published and may not be part of the official Auto Trails series of maps.
Possibly debunking the myth, Wisconsin began a state-sponsored initiative to improve highways in 1916. The funding for this produced a map in 1917 with numbered highway routes. It is not clear if this map pre-dates the Brink map or whether the signs were erected concurrently. From the literature, it is clear that when producing an Auto Trails map for Wisconsin in 1918 they used a different numbering system and the proliferation of different numbering systems from public and private bodies (even when referring to the same route) led to the national highways numbering system in the mid-1920s.
Honestly this would be a cool series, lost maps throughout history
Hey Tigerstar I suggest you go contact the lost media wiki the people there probably have more experience finding missing history than you do not to mention the benefits of spreading the search to a whole community. P.S do you have any of your lost alt history videos you have uploaded some to a secondary channel but I think there's more. Have them be unlisted if you want for history's sake.
PennDOT had numbered highways in 1916 and put out a map with it, which is preserved on their website for some counties, including Schuylkill County. 1917 would not have been the first numbered highway map in the U.S.
was it penndot back then?
@@herzogsbuick a direct predecessor, the Dept. Of Highways.
A company not knowing its History isn't terribly surprising Crayola crayons and was able to find information about their catalog history that Crayola itself did not know because they never thought it was important. And so their history basically starts with whatever they could confirm
There are also loads of amateur map collectors out there, surely if it was at least not that uncommon, it should exist in someone's collection. Especially if it was this pivotal in the numbering systems, it should be known in their community and thus motivate collecting it more than an average tourist map from the era.
The map was the friends we made along the way
We guys should find it
Also, there may be copies in personal collections. I have a moderate map collection but it's diminished due to age and lack of interest on my part. Obviously, trying to find private collections would be an impossible task. But, one thing that you might want to try is estate sales. If the estate sale is online (particularly if it's an auction.), items like this may appear. These may be blink and you miss it moments. But, it might work to do a periodic search like once a month to see if you can stumble across it.
The history page on the Rand McNally site was caught by Yandex Web Cache, so you can still see it. But this quote is all it has to say on the topic and there is no further source cited.
"1917 - On a map of Peoria, Illinois, the company debuts a new highway numbering system that will become the model for the system used across the United States today."
They can put whatever they want on their Website but that's a demonstrative false statement. First, Peoria is a city, not a region or state so any highway numbering wouldn't do any good. Second, other regions had numbering schemes prior to 1917. Third, the need for a highway numbering scheme came from the states, not a map company. They wanted a national system, not named highways. No where in the report about the numbering scheme does it mention Rand McNally as the source of their numbering scheme.
This is going to be your equivalent to CGP Grey's search for the origins of the name Tiffany.
After a bit of rabbit-hole exploration, I think I have some useful info.
According to the Newberry Library's online *catalog*, they DO have a 1917 Auto Trails Map in their Rand McNally Collection (Call No.: "RMcN Auto Trails 6F 42.5"). It's titled, "Rand McNally Official Auto Trails Map: Southern Wisconsin, Northern Illinois." According to the catalog record, the Newberry describes this as the "First map issued in Rand McNally's 'Auto Trails' series of regional road maps." HOWEVER, I do not think this is actually true based on what else I've found. The Library of Congress's "Catalog of Copyright Entries" (for 1917) lists this map as having been published July 6, 1917. In late June 1917, however, Rand McNally & Co. published what I believe to be the legitimately first map of the "Auto Trails Map" series. It's called the "Rand McNally Official Auto Trails Map, District No. 1: Illinois, Western Indiana, S.E. Iowa, N.E. Missouri." Apparently multiple versions of this one at slightly different scales were copyrighted separately, with two dated June 20th and one June 16th. And to support that this was the first one, there are a few contemporary newspaper articles that I found via the University of Illinois's Digital Newspaper Collections that all point to this. Most significant is an article in the Free Trade-Journal (Ottawa, IL), 18 June, 1917, which announces the recent publication of the map and hailing it as the "first official auto trail map in which all the organized trails of the state are included." It's also clearly this District No. 1 map and not the more limited map, since it explicitly states it covers District No. 1, comprising ALL of Illinois and parts of the adjacent states. It make no mention of preceding works and clearly seems to give the impression that the nature of the map is novel. Likewise, there are a few other articles in various local papers (mostly in April 1917) mentioning and hyping up the ongoing efforts to expand trails and gather info on trail routes in preparation for an ambiguous map or maps to be published by Rand McNally & Co.
(As a side note, in these articles a local automobile figure, "A. E. Nissen," associating with Rand McNally, features prominently, even so far as saying in the June 18th article that this first map was prepared under his direction. Maybe he was essentially operating directly under Brink in the Auto Trails Map department of the company?)
Not sure what purpose the southern Wisconsin & northern Illinois map published shortly afterwards served. It could just be that they had a lot of Chicago-based automobile-related companies (and their customers) that they could tailor to as a specialized market for a more narrowly defined map? The major "District" maps of the series appear to have been the flagship publications, covering their respective, non-overlapping regions. Meanwhile they published these one-off maps, usually for individual states.
All this being said, both maps (or at the least, the District No. 1 map) seem to cover an area that would likely include Peoria, IL. It doesn't seem far-fetched to me that one of these are the "1917 Peoria Map." Based on other "Auto Trails" maps published in the following years, Peoria seemed to be one of the cities in Illinois that was a major hub for the auto trails, so maybe that brought extra attention to it in the eyes of initial researchers or historians? In one of the newspaper articles, it is made to seem like Rand McNally & Co.'s efforts were going towards simply making a county map for that paper's home county. Maybe a similar instance happened in a Peoria newspaper, and a later company historian just happened to stumble into that article, jumped to conclusions, and ran with that story?
Aside from those, I also found in Peoria Public Library's online catalog that they have a Business/Landowner's Directory for Peoria & Tazwell Counties, Illinois (Call No.: "917.735 BUS"), published in 1916, and curiously enough, by Rand McNally & Co. The reason I bring this up is that often directories arrange for the inclusion of a local map of the city or locale that they cover for reference purposes. So it's possible that this idea of a "Peoria Map" being trialed beforehand does exist, but it was just included as supplementary material within another publication instead of as a standalone map. The publication year is not 1917, but it might even make more sense if it was published earlier in 1916, considering Brink supposedly promoted the system in 1916 as well as there being an already substantial proliferation of these auto trails by automobile clubs and boosters in the buildup to 1917. The Illinois Digital Archives has a set of maps from the Illinois State Library that they have digitized in a collection called, "Illinois State Highway Maps," and the earliest map in it is a map prepared by the Illinois State Highway Department and dated to 1 February, 1917. It shows a legend of auto trails in the state at that time with rough illustrations of the signs used to demarcate them (just as Rand McNally do, but without keying them to numbers), so clearly this marking of trails with signs with specific symbols and patterns was already substantial by February 1917. But at the same time, the map also seems to show that the system is rapidly expanding since many of the trails have yet to adopt unique signs, and there seem to have been a few more very recently added late in preparation of the map as they are listed at the end, out of alphabetical order. This probably shows how Rand McNally was to some degree pushing things along, and that they already had been helping establish trails and signage in 1916, going into 1917.
Peoria Public Library (and probably other places) also has the normal yearly "Leshnick's Peoria City Directories," so that could be another possibility for containing a local Peoria map. There might also be some information about local publications like these, containing maps, in newspapers local to Peoria, if someone had access to them.
I was going to wrap it up there without having found any image of these initial 1917 Auto Trails Maps: the southern WI, northern IL map in the Newberry not being digitized, and there being seemingly no record of the 1917 District No. 1 map anywhere. But then your comment, "of course, Google has been rather terrible with it's search engine lately," popped into my mind, and I went out on a whim and decided to search using Bing, and LO AND BEHOLD. (By the way, I was laughing to myself after this.) Among the first returns were for a site called WorthPoint, which I guess is designed for monitoring online auctions and marketplaces like eBay to track individual items but all in one place? Not sure how big or useful they are. Anyway, they seem to have sales and listings from places like eBay, and even after they seem to be taken down on eBay, so they kind of archive listings, which is why I couldn't find anything on eBay after trying to look them up; and additionally, for whatever reason, these pages are not showing up on the results for Google. WorthPoint has FIVE individual listings/sales (that I could find), originally from eBay, for the earlier 1917 "Rand McNally Official Auto Trails Map, District No. 1" and they do actually include photos of the map. Most of them are not high enough resolution to really make use of for information, but some show a corner in high enough resolution, and you can clearly get a general understanding of the features of the map. It does show notable differences to all of the subsequent Auto Trails maps, which convinces me more that this was definitely the first map: 1) the trail numbers are dark text in white boxes, instead of white text in dark boxes; 2) the legend is running along the top margin, above the map, and not down one of the sides; and 3) the signs for the trails themselves are not simply presented as rectangles, they are actually depicted wrapping around a cross-section of a wood pole. You can easily find these just by searching on WorthPoint for "1917 auto trails map" (not in quotes, but as separate keywords).
Obviously, these earliest maps do exist, at least in private hands. On WorthPoint, the sales information for each item is hidden unless you make an account, so I didn't bother to look further into by whom and when these maps were sold (but someone probably could easily if they wanted to). I wouldn't be surprised if there were more in public collections. They probably are in at least a few places like local historical societies and archives, but just treated as generic ephemeral materials and not archived or cataloged separately yet.
A simple search for "Auto Trails Map 1917" found this item. If you are looking for archives and don't know about OCLC's Worldcat product, a lot of librarians will be AWFULLY SAD... But then again, librarians aren't the greatest for reminding people about their jobs and what people can get help with if they ask.
If the map was copyrighted then it should in the Library of Congress. I did a quick search and got no hits on a Peoria map. I did get results for a Texas, California and Philadelphia "new road atlas" all with a 1917 pub. date. The maps are not digitized but are available to view in the Map Reading Room in the Madison building.
8:17 -- For almost a decade I was the Reference Archivist at a major institution. Many times I have had to explain to people that not every single document gets preserved. It is just not possible to save everything.
As for maps, that was not my area of expertise, but I can concur that things like road maps (and municipal transit maps) were less likely to be preserved than official things produced by government.
If nothing else, these types of maps get damaged and worn-out from use and/or they are superseded by newer editions and disposed of. My own set of road maps gets "refreshed" from time to time.
On the other hand some map companies do archive every map they ever printed - Melways directories in Australia for example have all their annually updated street maps, from their very first, online.
I put the old RM URL into the Wayback Machine and there's not much on that old page. It's basically a less-sophisticated version of the current timeline. The entry for 1917 says simply "On a map of Peoria, Illinois, the company debuts a new highway numbering system that will become the model for the system used across the United States today." It also looks like eBay has all kinds of RM maps from 1917, including Illinois, in the $40 range.
We got some map lost media now
Lost mapia.
There are a few maps on eBay listed as 1917 Rand McNally, including one for Illinois. Can’t confirm the authenticity or accuracy of the listings, but you can have eBay monitor search criteria indefinitely and notify if something specific is listed.
Video was very good and interesting. Thanks for that.
7:33 Rare secret recording of Tigerstar's real voice with trusted advisors on his mountain retreat, 1944 colorized
Don't email big companies. You usuall don't get very far that way. Try to find a phone number (bonus points if it's not the main customer service line) or visit in person.
4:54 - so, it is not just me... I thought that I'm doing something wrong with my searches... I used to find things I wanted to in seconds, now it's many, many minutes, if ever...
No accident and annoying as F!
Deja Google went bonkers first, like 20 years ago. When they acquired Deja News (a Usenet archive), they kept it up in good shape for just a few years, then very suddenly turned it to seeming randomness. This year Google finally stopped updating that archive at all.
Interesting video. As a kid (ok as an adult too😊) I loved collecting and looking at those gas stations maps.
what a fascinating story and map mystery. crazy to think how many things are sitting in archives, not uploaded to the internet, nearly impossible to find
Companies are also not the best archivists, since that's not their purpose; they have every incentive to claim such a map exists, but that doesn't mean the claim is accurate (not necessarily that they're lying, but it could be a chain of hearsay and misunderstanding and clerical errors)
Some more things to try to find that map, though you may have thought of them.
- Library of Congress
- Smithsonian
- state of IL and Peoria historical societies
- archivists and collectors who specialize in maps
- instead of just sending an email, get the name of the library or association's archivist and get them a call. Your personal inquiry may get a faster and more in-depth search going
Nice stuff, good luck
I wish hand drawn maps were still as common as back then
Ive always wanted to buy one but theyre always so expensive or just fake
Please continue to delve deeply into the history of everything - In particular maps. Ever since I was taught as a young child by my civil engineer father to read a contour map, I have been fascinated by maps.
"3. No more copies exist" - A very real possibility. Consider Frank Capra's 1937 movie "Lost Horizon" (an ironic title for sure) that has no complete prints remaining. It was nominated for several Oscars including Best Picture, and won two technical awards, yet all we have now is a Frankenstein restoration pieced together from different versions, that substitutes 7 minutes of missing footage with photo stills.
I used to use the Old Maps app a lot. It was kinda glitchy, but in one final glitch it croaked!
Could be in some random persons attic or something. It’s wild the kinda things that pop up in peoples attics. In 2018 a photo of Rommel shaking hands with the guy who was agreed by the July 20th plotters to take power after the attack had it succeeded was found in someone’s attic
If you haven't tried these yet, and they are admittedly long shots, but contact the Public Library in Peoria and perhaps the library at Bradley University in Peoria.
It wouldn't surprise me if it turned out that no more copies exist. I have a collection of (mostly) gas station maps of various states/areas, and some of the oldest dating to merely the 1950s are so fragile I'm afraid to unfold them.
Maybe they drafted a map in 1917 that they broadly liked but which had various revisions made to it before being published generally in 1918. If so, the "original" may not have existed even 100+ years ago.
"An experimental / test map in 1917, which was then released generally in 1918" seems a quite reasonable interpretation.
Something related to number 2: they didn’t consider it important so someone from the company took it rather than have it end up in the trash. Also the company could have given it to John Brink as a memento.
Did you try emailing the academic who wrote that 12-page paper? I find they are often quite helpful when someone shows an interest in their research passions.
Have you tried the Peoria library or historical society?
I have done a a lot of historical research on different subjects, including for my M.A. & Ph.D. That was all done B.I. (Before Internet). Even today I far prefer visiting an archive than merely checking online. Whatever you may think and an archive may tell you, huge swatchs of material have not been scanned or even cataloged. The rules that I follow for visits are start with the largest repositories on the subject, then jump scale to the most local. Also check with official state archives--again visits are better. It's vitally important to network with archivists and librarians and get them thinking about complimentary sources.
If I were still living in New York City, this video might get me to try the New York Public Library for it. At least one collection the Research Library Annex had was more complete than that of the organization that originated the serial in question, and if I were researching a lot of other things I probably would've found that to be the case for many others.
That the Newberry Library can't find that map doesn't mean they don't have it--they've got lots of boxes of donated material still uncatalogued. As of ~15 years ago there was still a McNally on their board. If you can track him down, you might ask him about it.
From what I can tell this particular map was not a standalone map, but was part of the Rand McNally 1917 Illinois Pocket Index map. Which, from what I can tell, hasn't been digitized, hence the lack of an online capture of the map being available.
Don't know how big the Newbury's map collection is, but both the University of Illinois at Urbana and Western Illinois University (near Peoria) have large and extensive map collections in their map libraries. I've visited both and much of their collection is not be digitized. Email and/or phone calls to their librarians would let you know if a 1917 Peoria road map was in their collection.
The next time that I am in Peoria, I will ask at some of the local libraries for the map. Or have some of my friends living there to do so.
From my own relatively limited research around the auto trails and the Lincoln highway and Arrowhead highway in particular it seems that people were still calling the old routes by their boosterism and association names, where they existed, as late as at least the early 20s, at least from books from the time that I've read like Family Flivvers to Frisco. A few old maps have numbers to reference to the roads with their actual names on a key but from what I've seen and from my own digging through guidebooks and maps those numbers don't correspond to the ones used when the federal government actually created the numbered roads (US-50, US-66 etc) as we know them today in the late 20s that replaced the earlier private/state system of auto trails. I'd love to be corrected on this though
You probably want to ask at the Smithsonian. They have some Rand Mcnally corporate records.
Oooo, if the first road map IS of Peoria, that would be amazing (I live 45 minutes from Peoria).
I live in Peoria, have you ever been here before?
I was partial to H.M. Gousha maps, and I still use them, although they are no longer available. I would rather use an old paper map than an online map. Ironically, HMG was sold to Rand McNally in 1996.
You didn't mention looking at the Library of Congress, Smithsonian, World Cat, Peoria or Illinois Historical archives.
Naturally "Rand McNally International Atlas of The World 1917 Oversized Book Maps" is already in someone's cart
Internet Archive shows that the randmcnally history url (with three w's) made the claim "1917 On a map of Peoria, Illinois, the company debuts a new highway numbering system that will become the model for the system used across the United States today" until at least July 2023. By September it had been redesigned to the current version, though the text of the bullet points doesn't seem to have been captured.
Hey emperor tigerstar can you do that clash between china and india in 2020 where in total 24 people died; 4 chinese and 20 indians?
It can still be considered a war.
I still keep a Rand-McNally atlas in each vehicle, because phones aren't infallible.
I wonder if the timing of the release has anything to do with it… 1917 was before WWI and the Spanish Flu Epidemic, maybe some things needing to being reused during that time and were documented in the chaos.
Peoria public library would be the best place to start.
As some people have said already, I would try to search for historical societies, libraries, etc. from Peoria itself or surrounding area (or at the very least, focused in Illinois).
Maybe look up the Illinois State Archives or the Library of Congress?
Did you go to the public libraries and archives in Peoria? Seems like they would be likely to have a copy of it.
It's so sad how hard it is to find stuff on the internet these days :[
A couple of comments mentioned the Library of Congress. I believet they are suppose to receive a copy of every copywrighted publication. Assuming it was copywrighted, they should have it. Another possible source might be the US Geologic Survey. It's possible they may have used it as a source.
you could check the Library of Congress Digital Collections
The map production date was 1917; the.map publication date was 1918.
That dhould put you in the right direction.
Exactly what I was thinking
This is something i would do, i would lose one and feel so bad i would go about and recreate (the routes) from scratch.
Another option is that it is not a map of Peoria in that case it would almost be impossible to find
Did you try the Library of Congress? Or, possibly, AAA?
Time to go to estate sales in Peoria to see if any have been sitting in someone's attic for decades.
Trace the reference, not the map. This reminds me of an issue I ran into regarding a story about Robert Louis Stevenson arriving in Monterey. Something about the story didn't ring true to me so I started tracing the reference only to discover that it was a circular reference. Book A references Book B, Book B references Book C, Book C references Book A... When I finally broke free of the loop I discovered that the citations had all originated from a fictional account based on second hand recollections and hearsay. People doing bad research and filling in blanks with assumptions was another issue I often ran into. Bottom line, if it can't be traced, it might not have existed in the first place. One possible way to find out if it did would be to research whether or not the claims have any validity. Before federal standardization highways were marked by private organizations. The "Auto Trails" system. Rand McNally wasn't the only one putting up signs to mark roads.
I notice a lot of librarians commenting on this one, and why none of them offered up OCLC's Worldcat product is beyond me. And ep, there it is with a simple search "Auto Trails Map 1917." One result. I bet that's it.
I wish Rand McNally made the maps for Google.
Hard to believe a copy of this map isn't stored in the Library of Congress.
yay a new vid
Did you try asking The Peoria Historical Society?
The Library of Congress might be worth a shot.
Why is the car on the title page look like the one the Ant Hill Mob drives on Wacky Races!
I checked the Internet Archive and couldn't find it there.
Have you tried the Library of Congress?.... RF
Maybe a dumb question but have you tried Peoria Illinois?
Rand McNally didn't invent numbered roads & they didn't write the Wikipedia article that you were citing. The article clearly states that one of it's cartographers invented A system that was published in 1917 and it was of Peoria, IL. It doesn't mean that road system was transformative. It was just a system, not THE system. That would explain why it's not on Rand McNally's Website history and the fact that you can't find the map elsewhere. BTW, I would email historians in Peoria to see if they have a map. Also, there's no reference for that sentence. Without a reference, it's not a verifiable fact.
Named roads existed nearly a decade earlier, like the Lincoln Highway. New England had a numbered road system prior to 1917 and many of those roads still use those same numbers. Prior to the 1926 numbering system, these auto trails connected places and while regional and national in scope, they were private organizations and it created a Hodge Podge system. States came to an agreement with a numbering system by 1926 and that system took over the named auto trails. The auto trails would continue as a marketing system but Fisher's 1912 vision for improved roads and the construction of the coast to coast Lincoln Highway served its purpose.
With a numbering system in place, travelers were free to roam about the country and the American road trip was born. Rand McNally was simply printing maps with a numbering system that was in place, not something that they came up with. There's a whole Wikipedia article on the United States Numbered Highway System and you can read more of the history there.
I’d try oil companies, they have history divisions.
9:25 Hubert Humphrey jumpscare
Library of Congress, maybe?
Ephemera like this was used for starting fires, and sold as scrap paper.
Rand McNally is also a country where people wear shoes on their heads and hamburgers eat people.
i love you emperor tigerstar
Have you tried to contact the Library of Congress? They have a record of everything.
Like to back up some to the railroad part of Rand-McNally. In 1978 I had loaned a RN easter US map at the local library, to study the area of Rangeley Lakes as a SR&RL enthusiast. Always been tinkering with maps, but was to create a freestanding 2-foot rwy idea after articles in some model magazines, primarily the Narrow Gauge Gazette. Anyway, a bit northwest of Rangely, I found a small winding forest road up to Kennebago Lake, being an inspiration for my own rwy kingdom. In the late 1990s with first MapQuest and later Google Maps, I followed my imaginary rwy along a perfect Right of Way. Then, in 2006, I found a German narrow-gauge wiki, listing my little rwy as a part of Maine Central 1905-15. Think of what ideas a RN map could spawn, Google Maps is not the same, just bland. I bought the particular map in the 1980s when having my first salary; Rand-Mcnally maps was really dream catchers.
Library of Congress perhaps?
Did you search the Library of Congress? When all else fails, I go there.
Yo- so cool video-work-
Of all the physical archives to go to, ones in or near Peoria would be most likely to have it.
Highly doubt it. Also the Peoria historical society (and the library) is in the WORST part of town. Trust me, I live only a 1/2 mile away.
@@schylarvelez46 My best guess. Where would you figure it'd be?
@@nateghast6456 Library of Congress. The Peoria history society is also terrible at keeping records (Ironic isn’t it?)
This is a true map quest!
Come on internet… check your grandparent’s attic.
Option 4 must be true. Why else would they hide it?
I found an old map of East Germany that i don't know how to preserve? O reversed image searched it and couldnt find anything like it so id like to digitize it. I dont have a photocopeier big enough for it. Can i just go to some random library for help or what can i do?
Go to a university library. One of their main jobs is preserving historical documents.
@@no.no.4680 Cool. Thank you
There's probably one sitting in an old petrol station somewhere, unsold.
Did you check the Library of Congress?