Description

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In 1905 Homer Sargent Michaels, an automobile agent based in Chicago, developed an unusual solution to one of the thorniest problems facing early motorists: how to find one’s way from one city to another along the poorly marked rural roads of the time.  Michaels’s solution was to take photographs of every major intersection or turning point along a given route. The resulting books—ancestors of today’s digital in-car navigation systems—were remarkably useful, but few copies survive.
Now the Chicago Map Society, in collaboration with the Newberry Library, has compiled a new edition of one of Michaels’s 1905 guides showing the route from Chicago to Lake Geneva, a resort town in southern Wisconsin. This new edition reproduces the entire guide, along with brief explanations and new photographs of the same locations today, as well as an introduction by the Newberry Library’s curator of maps, Robert W. Karrow Jr. Chicago to Lake Geneva: A 100-Year Road Trip is a stellar  presentation of a historical artifact—and a fascinating drive down memory lane. 

About the Author

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Robert W. Karrow Jr. is curator of special collections and maps in the Roger and Julie Baskes Department of Special Collections at the Newberry Library.

James R. Akerman is curator of maps at the Newberry Library, and director of the library’s Hermon Dunlap Smith Center for the History of Cartography.