1889 Irvington Map

Being a Surveyor Eric has a fascination with old maps. Being Eric, he has a fascination with many other things old, so it's not unusual to find him haunting an auction or antique shop if he has a few spare minutes. (Not that he has many of those these days!) But, recently there was one such auction that had some Survey related items and he made the time to go. It turned out to be even more interesting than that once he got his purchase home. :D

What he found was an Atlas of Indianapolis from 1889. It's huge! But the part that's most interesting to you all is that this was before Christian Park was established and you can see that the lands that will eventually become CP were owned by Thomas Moore at that time. But there is a detailed map of Irvington... so here are the pictures I took of the maps. I apologize in advance for the quality.

This is the Irvington Page. Or more correctly two pages. It's really cool. I'm going backwards here. This is the most detailed map in the book. It shows the house outlines on the lots in the shapes that the houses really are. The following seven maps are blowups of this map.

Starting in the lower left corner. Hi the Horner House!!! Notice the strange shape? We now know that's because of the porches that were on it. It's approximately right. 

Next square above the HH. Here you can see Emerson Avenue labeled as the National Road.

Upper Left hand square. You can see how they had the boundary of Irvington going past Emerson in a very jagged pattern. This accounts for where people came up with Howe High School being part of Irvington.

Center top section. See Pleasant Run. (Oh Bad Amanda!) You can see that at this time there were only a few large houses in this whole area.

Bottom center section. Hello Butler University! Hello the Bona! Again, notice how few houses there are in this entire area.

Top right corner. The North Circle and again a very few houses. Irvington in it's early days. But these houses were huge!

Bottom right corner. The South Circle. Hello the Cuff's! Love that house!!! And Bill Gulde's house wasn't built yet. :D Again, few large homes.

Now, let's go out step...

This is the Center Township Page. You can see Irvington in Pink at the Bottom.

Here's a blowup of the bottom of the page. It still shows houses on lots, but they are just little square blocks here are apposed to actual outlines.

That's all the detailed maps I have, but here's the front page of the book. (To do the whole book would be hundreds of pictures and not much interest here.)

To geeks like Eric and I, this is really cool, so I'm going to add a few more blow ups.

1889 Baby!!! The house was only 14 when this was done.

Not done by computer.

So, I just had to share. Eric isn't alone in his love of old things and I thought this find was amazing!!!

-Amanda

***Looking back at the atlas again today not all of the lots are numbered and not all of the houses and buildings are shown on any of the detailed pages. I think they may have just chosen just the largest buildings in any given area. Makes sense when I stop and think about it. Still a cool map!