Historical Atlas of Iowa
I have purchased a copy of the Illustrated Historical Atlas of the State of Iowa, 1875, by A. T. Andreas reprint done by the State Historical Society of Iowa. The reason I bought it was because it has a picture, which is on my home page, of my great grandfather's, Fredrick Radloff, place of business - "Radloff's Billiard Hall." Now I begin to understand why there was a pool table at all my Uncle and Aunt's houses.
Before you get too excited don't try to call the State Historical Society of Iowa for a copy because it's out of print and pretty hard to find. I found my copy by searching via at Bibliofind or you can try Advance Book Exchange. I found several of the reprints of the Atlas for prices ranging from $30 to $80. I also found several original versions for about $1300.
If you desire you can obtain photocopies of various pages you can do so by sending specific citations to the State Historical Society of Iowa at either their Iowa City or Des Moines address. You would be billed for pages copied and postage.
The book as reissued by the State Historical Society of Iowa has 596 pages and includes:
- 83 full county maps
- 44 pages with 198 plats of cities and towns
- 182 pages containing 587 "handsome engravings" of homes, farms, and places of business
- 84 pages of county histories
- 56 pages listing all the patrons of the Atlas
- 10 pages consisting of engraved portraits of 220 Iowans.
According to the State Historical Society of Iowa this work is the most frequently consulted volume in their library and I can see why. Some of the engravings fill the page of this 11x9 inch reprint volume. The original volume is 14 1/2 inches by 17 1/2 inches in size - quite a lapful. It appears the patrons could 'buy' space of various sizes ranging from 1/20th of a page to the full page. The Radloff Billiard Hall is one of the 1/20th page engravings. All in all this is a pretty cool reference for genealogists.
In October 1998, I obtained permission from the State Historical Society of Iowa to post the Index to the 1970 reprint of the Andreas' book. I also consolidated some of the data into one table after noticing that some of the people in the portrait section had biographies and engravings of their homes, farms, or business. Permission was also given for the information to be posted on the Iowa page of the USGENWEB project and should appear there sometime in the future.
While I've included the total index it is quite large (approx 360k) and may take a while to load. Basically, what I did was to scan in the index and OCR it. I've also broken the index down into the following smaller sections:
Table of Contents (TOC)
County Listing which lists the page number for the map, history, patrons and business directories
Plats, Cities, and Towns listing the page numbers where you might find a map of a city or town you are interested in
Indexes of names listed in the index. Here I got a 'bit' creative when I noticed some of the patrons had their portrait, biography, and engraving of their home or place of business in the book. So on these pages you'll see a table showing who could afford to be listed in several places. Also, when the index was done, different spellings of the persons name were entered. I've attempted to sort this out and merge listing where with a reasonable amount of credibility do so. If I couldn't confirm it was the same person I left it as two entries. Finally, since the name index was so large, I broke it down as follows: A-B C-D E-G H-J K-L M-N O-R S-T U-Z
If you are interested in a sample of what other types of genealogical data is available in the book, I've extracted some information from the patron index on Calmar Township, Winnesheik County. The patron index lists their name, business, residence, where they were born, year arrived in Iowa and Post Office.