|
||
|
|
|
|
Issued at the outset of the Great Depression, this wall map functions as a Rosetta Stone linking Montana’s late-frontier settlement pattern with the sweeping economic and infrastructural changes that followed almost immediately and offers the most comprehensive single-sheet portrait of Montana then available.
By 1925 Montana had completed the carving of its 56 counties, the highest number west of the Mississippi, and the recto of this double-sided map ranks among the earliest commercial wall maps to depict that final configuration in full color, establishing a baseline for every subsequent political map of the state. It also captures Montana’s rail network at its zenith, when branch lines still stitched together mining camps, grain elevators, and timber towns; within a decade many of these routes would be truncated or abandoned as traffic dwindled and trucking took over. Every county, township, city, village, and post office is plotted; steam and electric railways are traced with station-to-station mileages; and the entire Public Land Survey grid is superimposed, an invaluable aid for land investors and surveyors.
The verso shows the fledgling numbered-highway system, adopted only in 1926, boldly traced in green. By 1930 routes such as U.S. 10, 91, and 2 were in place, though still largely gravel, and the green-overprint edition preserves this embryonic network just before New Deal paving projects reshaped it. The side panel listing “Montana Airports” documents the first generation of landing fields, often nothing more than pastures on town outskirts. Other practical information for 1930s auto travelers includes a legend distinguishing paved, improved-gravel, and unimproved roads, green asterisks marking mileage points, and an “Automobile License Prefix Numbers” table; even township grids are subdued so the highway network dominates.
Finally, the prominent Public Land Survey grid reflects an era when land sales and homestead filings were still active in eastern Montana; the 1934 Taylor Grazing Act would soon curtail such disposals, making this one of the last maps to portray unclaimed sections as prospective farmland rather than permanent rangeland.
Both sides have inset topographical maps of Yellowstone and Glacier National Parks, the verso with the highway routes superimposed, and population data taken from the 1930 Federal Census. Begun on April 1, 1930, only months after the 1929 stock-market crash, the census recorded the nation’s pre-Depression population peak of about 122 million people. Population figures therefore record the high-water mark of many rural counties and railroad towns; the Depression and 1930s drought soon triggered steep out-migration and the abandonment of scores of post offices that still appear here.
