Life in a very small town: North Central Phoenix, circa 1885
I was browsing The Library of Congress’ Maps Collections, and found a Bird’s eye view of Phoenix, sketched by C.J. Dyer in 1885. I don’t know how large the original map was, but it needs a lot of area in order to make out the detail… much more than I can see on my monitor; much more than I have to show it to you here. But for fun, I made a screen shot of the northern edges of civilized Phoenix.
The sketch is oriented as though the artist was standing southwest of the center of town. That’s Central, which was called Centre back then, shooting past Monroe Street and then Van Buren Street. Do you notice the canal running along the south side of Van Buren? The map’s legend tells us that this is the Salt River Canal! You can’t see it from this shot, but the complete map shows another canal that used to run through the city further north, around Indian School, called the Maricopa Canal, with the Grand Canal just north of that.
The next gridline north of and parallel to Van Buren — the one with the little white structure on the northeast corner — must be Roosevelt, so would that make the next grid line, the one with a few trees lined up along it east of Central, McDowell? If so, the next road to the north should be Thomas. But… the legend tells us that the estate on the northwest corner of that intersection belonged to J.T. Simms, who came to Arizona in 1881 with the Atlantic and Pacific Railroad Company. However, we know that the property that Colonel Simms owned along Central, between Roosevelt and Moreland, was subdivided in 1893 and is now part of the Roosevelt Historic District. Since we have no reason to expect this map was drawn to scale, perhaps that corner of this map is the forerunner of today’s Roosevelt Historic District. Have any of you already researched this? If so, I’d love to see comments on what you’ve learned…
Anyway, the map is pretty cool. You can look at the full map at The Library of Congress site, which uses a technology developed by LizardTech, called mrSID. You can even download the map to your own Mac or PC, and download a free mrSID viewer from LizardTech, which gives you much more control over the pan and zoom.
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