Making these maps pulled from a lot of different sources and involved a lot of analysis that I had not previously done on an academic project before. It involved both reading primary and secondary sources to gauge attitudes toward travel and analysis of maps and directories to determine travel distances. Each of the main “chapters” of my map presents a different year in the early history of white settlement in the Kenyon quadrangle, and I drew on different sources for each of these years to come to the conclusions that I did.

For 1854, I used Frederick L. Johnson’s Goodhue County: A Narrative History, which includes historical, legal, and cultural background on Goodhue County. Also useful was Lilly Setterdahl’s Minnesota Swedes, in which she follows a specific group of immigrants involved in the first waves of settlement in the county. In her book, she includes transcriptions from the 1850s of letters that immigrants living in Goodhue County wrote to their relatives in Sweden describing their new home. In addition, I used the original land surveys from 1854 and plat maps from 1874 to construct a possible property distribution.

The 1874 map draws again primarily on the 1874 plat map of Goodhue County for information on travel routes and settlement placement as it relates to property distribution. It also uses more historical background from Johnson and Setterdahl, which both draw upon primary sources for their narratives. My focus on post offices draws upon the work of Roy W. Meyer in his book The Ghost Towns and Discontinued Post Offices of Goodhue County, in which he outlines the importance of post offices to the early settlers. I used his work and those based on it from the Goodhue County Historical Society to locate these post offices in the quadrangle and determine the spatial spread of their utilization.

The 1894 map also draws upon the plat map from the same year, but I used it in a slightly different way. That year’s map showed not a single section of the whole county that wasn’t claimed as someone’s property. In addition, that was the first year from which I could reference the Kenyon newspaper, The Kenyon Leader. I used it primarily to determine which people were associated with which towns, and then found the properties of those people on the plat map to determine the areas from which people traveled to their respective towns. I also used the newspaper to determine where people traveled and what sort of attitude people had toward traveling different distances.

The 1914 map obviously draws upon plat maps and the same books as sources. Specifically, I used interviews conducted by Lilly Setterdahl with people who had grown up in rural Goodhue County in the early 20th century. They recounted stories and described what it was like to live in the time and place depicted by my map. They had a lot to say about the nature of travel in the area, as well as their relationship with settlements and other people. I used these to gauge attitudes toward travel after the advent of Rural Free Delivery.

My modern map drew mostly upon modern road maps and my own personal experience of moving through both the Kenyon quadrangle and the rural Midwestern area where I grew up. I based my analysis of the modern space based on how I experienced moving through it in a car, which I describe in further detail on the map’s page. The experience that I described prompted my choice of the plain road basemap rather than the terrain map, as terrain is not a consideration for modern travel methods as it would have been prior to vehicular travel.

Limitations

My work on these maps was severely limited both by the software that I used and source availability. There are several things that I spent significant time trying to do but ended up ultimately failing and abandoning the whole idea. This took place in three different aspects of mapping: map interactions, visualizations, and concept.

Originally, I wanted the map viewer to be able to travel through the map as if actually traveling through the space. I wanted them to be able to click on optional routes from one specific place and then more options to branch from there, therefore allowing for an interacting experience rather than just a still reconstruction. This was inspired originally by Stanford’s ORBIS|via reconstruction of routes through the Roman world. However, I could not find a way to make these conditional interactions work using ArcGIS.

Ideally, I would have visualized more information in the maps themselves rather than relying so heavily on textual explanations to complement the maps. For example, I wanted to create circles of the immediate spatial imaginary for individual farms and properties to represent their specific immediate worlds, and ideally they would have only appeared when the viewer clicked the individual farms. However, because I could not make these circles appear only when clicked, they all appeared together, making the map difficult to read. I also wanted to make the base maps blend into each other to emphasize different types of interactions with the space. For instance, I wanted satellite imagery to appear on the modern map only within the visibility buffers extending out from the roads, and left the rest of the map the yellow road map. This would have represented the visibility of the space from the roads and the obscurity beyond those boundaries.

I also intended to make a first-person virtual movement experience that allowed the viewer to “walk” through the landscape while choosing these routes in order to virtually experience historical spatial imaginaries. I had planned to do this using Unity and Mapbox SDK. Unfortunately, time ran short as did my technical capabilities, and I needed to settle with the ArcGIS Scene Viewer instead.

Finally, I had originally intended to make a map that illustrated native American spaces through the perspective of the white settlers. However, I was unable to find sufficient source material available to me that could yield that sort of information.