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Distributed for Newberry Library

Chicago - Lake Geneva: A 100-Year Road Trip

Retracing the Route of H. Sargent Michaels’ 1905 Photographic Guide for Motorists

Introduction by Robert W. Karrow Jr. New photographs by Wilbert Stroeve and James R. Akerman

Distributed for Newberry Library

Chicago - Lake Geneva: A 100-Year Road Trip

Retracing the Route of H. Sargent Michaels’ 1905 Photographic Guide for Motorists

Introduction by Robert W. Karrow Jr. New photographs by Wilbert Stroeve and James R. Akerman
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.
 

160 pages | 340 halftones | 8 1/2 x 11 | © 2008

Chicago and Illinois

Geography: Cartography


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Table of Contents

Preface to this edition

Acknowledgements

Introduction to this edition

Cover of 1905 edition

Title page of 1905 edition

Preface to 1905 edition

1905 Route instructions

Photographs, Chicago-Lake Geneva

1905 route maps, Chicago-Lake Geneva

Photographs, Lake Geneva-Beloit

1905 route maps, Lake Geneva-Beloit

Photographs, Lake Geneva-Highland Park

1905 route maps, Lake Geneva-Chicago

1905 maps of Lake Geneva and Delavan Lake

Present-day route instructions

Present-day route maps

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