I write about the museums and parks of Prince Edward Island with an eye to what lessons I can carry away to Dayton and Ohio’s Miami Valley. We are a city of rivers, set in a valley with hills rising away on either side. I love the view of the city spread out before me, as I drive into Dayton over the hill at the intersection of Colonel Glenn Hwy and I-675 near Huffman Prairie where the Wright brothers flew.
There is another kind of urban view to which the public should have greater access – the panoramic views from tall buildings. I arrive early and armed with maps when someone invites me to the Racquet Club on the top of the Kettering Tower. I print out maps and views of Dayton from the late 19th century and stand at the windows, tracing the lines of the canals, the sites of factories, and the early the neighborhoods onto the landscapes stretching out below me. It may seem out of the way and inconvenient but it would be great to have an exhibit of Dayton and the Miami Valley, linking the history and the environment, with a 360’ view of the city. Imagine maps and images along with listening stations for stories with views out to NCR and the University of Dayton, Dayton View, the Canoe Club, the Dayton Art Institute, the Westside, Old North Dayton, the bridges, and the rivers.
The 1870 bird’s eye view of Dayton found in the Library of Congress’ American Memory Project collections shows houses, streets, and canals and even carriages, horses, and pedestrians. The view, produced in Chicago by the Merchants Lithographing Co. highlights some of the factory buildings. You can zoom around in the image – I usually find the courthouse and then I use it to locate particular streets and buildings including the old train station.
Sanborn Insurance Maps, created as an aid to insurance agents, show the outlines of structures –factories, shops, houses, sheds, saloons, apartments, neighborhood centers, churches — as well as the layout of the city. The maps identify building materials and the number of stories for each building. For old amusement parks like Lakeside in Dayton, the Sanborn maps show the configuration of the rides. The maps of Kossuth Colony where immigrant workers lived in side-by-side duplex worker housing behind tall wooden walls, emerging to cross the bridge to the factory each morning, show the walls and the housing. The original maps are bound in large volumes and can be found at Dayton History, Dayton Metro Library, or the Wright State University Special Collections and Archives. The maps are available online, in black and white, via either OPLIN or OhioLink’s Digital Media Collection. The maps are key word searchable and the zoom function lets you focus in on a particular street or structure.
You can print out both the bird’s eye view and the maps or copy the images to your desktop to insert into a document.
Dayton blogs have recently featured maps and photographs:
- Daytonology
- Real Dayton
- For the Love of Dayton
- Gem City
- and the Dayton Most Metro forum
Read about the Ohio Sanborn map collection in Charly Bauer and Carol Lynn Roddy, “Implementing Digital Sanborn Maps for Ohio: OhioLINK and OPLIN Collaborative Project” in D-Lib Magazine, December 2001, Volume 7 Number 12 at http://www.dlib.org/dlib/december01/bauer/12bauer.html
Thanks for pointing users to the Sanborn Maps hosted by OhioLINK on behalf of the public and academic library communities in Ohio. For your readers outside Ohio, I wanted to let them know that our license for the Sanborn Maps limits access to patrons of Ohio’s public libraries (through OPLIN) and Ohio’s academic libraries (through OhioLINK). Patrons of libraries in other states may have access to similar resources; please contact your local library for assistance.
Thanks for the advice to readers — I hope that they will contact their local libraries and find or access their local Sanborn Insurance maps. We are fortunate to have such a great resource so easily available here in Ohio. — Margie
There is another old view of Dayton in the local history room in the downtown library, from the 1850s, from a similar viewpoint as the LOC one.
It’s by either Palmatry or Sachs, two viewmakers from the antebellum era. I think it’s fairly accurate as some of the buildings on it can also be identified via photos in the library’s Lutzenberger Collection.
@@@
“It may seem out of the way and inconvenient but it would be great to have an exhibit of Dayton and the Miami Valley, linking the history and the environment, with a 360’ view of the city.”
This sounds a bit like Patrick Geddes’ “Outlook Tower”
http://patrickgeddes.co.uk/feature_eleven.html
Your blog is great! Here is the url of the blog from the Archives of the Sandusky Library, if you care to take a look:
http://sanduskyhistory.blogspot.com
An interesting project for those interested in reconstructing a neighborhood that might not have much in the way of aerial view maps:
Find the Sanborn map of the area and the time period, and photographs of buildings within the area you can.
Build mock-ups of the house using Google’s free Sketch-Up program– you can make them perfectly to scale. Detail can be as much or as little as you want/need for your project.
Take the Sanborn map, and sheet it over Google Earth. Put the buildings in their places.
You now have a 3-D reconstruction of a neighborhood that can be seen at any angle, etc. It’s a great tool for getting a feeling for an area, imagining the spatiality of an area, seeing physical problems that might help solve historical questions, etc.
And it’s relatively easy and free.
I did a reconstruction of the house I grew up in, in Tipp City… It came out pretty well, and wasn’t *too* difficult for a first-timer:
http://leisurelyhistorian.net/architectural-reconstruction-project-preliminary/