A rare automotive guidebook showcasing the Blue Grass Road, “a model dirt road through the famous Blue Grass Belt of Iowa.” Notable landmarks mentioned in the atlas include schools, houses,...
A rare automotive guidebook showcasing the Blue Grass Road, “a model dirt road through the famous Blue Grass Belt of Iowa.”
Notable landmarks mentioned in the atlas include schools, houses, churches, unusual rocks, windmills, statues, mailboxes and other charmingly quaint points of interest.
In addition to the numerous maps showing parts of the Blue Grass Road, there also scores of advertisements for local businesses, many of them automotive related, and descriptive essays of the following towns: Omaha; Glenwood; Malvern; Hastings; Emerson; and the Iowa towns of Red Oak; Stanton; Villisca; Nodaway; Corning; Kent; Creston; Afton; Russell; Melrose; Albia; Ottumwa; Fairfield; Birmingham; Burlington; Denmark and Fort Madison.
Melchior Huebinger emigrated from Germany to Davenport, Iowa, in 1880 to work as a surveyor and cartographer for the Army Corps of Engineers in Rock Island. He published his first local atlas of Scott County in 1882, and later produced hundreds of local maps and atlases in his downtown Davenport shop until 1910, when he moved to Des Moines to coordinate the first ever automobile road atlas of Iowa.