Browse Items (20 total)

Lead image of a detailed article on the best ways to lay out a farm renders a bird's eye view of a house, barn and outbuildings, fruit orchard, flower garden, penned livestock, and a field under cultivation. In the foreground a horse and wagon pass…

Birds-eye view maps were very popular during the last two decades of the 19th century. This high-end version almost certainly owes its existence to the popularity of the Chautauqua Institution, founded in 1874 and pictured in the lower left…

Promotional brochure from the motor age--"There is no Automobile Road Through the Gorge"--was created by an electric railway company started in the early 1890s. Capt. John M. Brinker, a Buffalo businessman, had the perseverance to capitalize a…

From a hillside looking approximately southwest, view shows part of the watershed supplying Hemlock Lake and ultimately the city of Rochester, NY. At the time of this photograph the town's population would have been around 1,700 people, still…

Postcard shows township located in Potter County, formed in 1804 and so remote that as of the 1830s one gazetteer wrote: "So little indeed is the county known or visited, that its very representatives in the assembly have scarce traversed it"…

Named after the miller Theophilus Short, this small village of perhaps 800 seems to have been using this map in an aspirational way: by visualizing itself as a place to which more businesses and people would locate. The main appeal was its situation…

Bird's eye view looking northwest shows the rapidly growing town of 3,200 located along Oatka Creek. Founded in 1803 from the Holland Purchase tract, agriculture followed the clearing of timber and by the later 19th century the town's economy was a…

Detailed map of former Erie Canal boomtown reflects its growth into a large city half a century later. Looking north, from Highland Park, we can trace the Genesee River to Lake Ontario. Several features from Rochester's earliest days still are…

From a vantage point looking westward, we see the town of approximately 3,000 about a century after its first settlers began arriving following the 1797 Big Tree treaty. Incorporated in 1814, Perry initially was an agricultural area that increasingly…

Looking roughly to the east, bird's eye view shows Oatka Creek winding through town of 5,000 as of 1890--the second largest in Genesee County after Batavia. First settled in 1793, Le Roy was created in 1812 from a portion of the Caledonia land…