1924: The Introduction of a Trailblazing Highways Map Guide

April 15, 1924

The Rand McNally Auto Chum, a highways map guide for car travel throughout the United States, was published. This guide was the first edition of what ultimately became the best-selling Rand McNally Road Atlas. The Auto Chum came out at a time when cars were increasingly embraced and used nationwide, and highways to accommodate those vehicles were steadily expanded and improved. 

Rand McNally was incorporated in 1873 with William H. Rand (1828-1915) as president and Andrew McNally (1836-1904) as vice president, and the company’s inaugural road atlas reflected the company’s already strong mapping tradition. While few if any copies of that atlas survive today, it is known that the guide contained hand-drawn images of concrete highways for all of the 48 states that comprised the United States in its entirety at that time. (The attached image of a concrete highway in the 1920s was one of many transportation-themed paintings created by Carl Rakeman [1878-1965] during his time as a U.S. Bureau of Public Roads employee.)

In addition, The Auto Chum was printed in just two colors: dark blue and red. Another scaled-back aspect of The Auto Chum was its lack of an index for cities or other destinations; drivers trying to figure out how to get somewhere had to page through the atlas unaided to find that information on their own. It is also worth noting that, since a national route-numbering system was not in place yet when The Auto Chum was published, the guide had to rely instead on listing roads by their names (e.g., the Lincoln Highway).  

The Auto Chum, while a pioneer in several respects, was not the first comprehensive road atlas of freshly drawn maps for the nation’s highways; the Clason Map Company released that seminal guide, entitled Best Roads of the United States, a few months earlier. Nonetheless, Rand McNally’s own entry into that world of motoring routes helped establish momentum and widen the demand for a means of navigation still used in print form to some degree but relied upon much more extensively via electronic versions.

Image Credit: Federal Highway Administration

For more information on The Rand McNally Auto Chum published in 1924, please check out   https://blog.gale.com/rand-mcnally-shows-the-way/ and https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2014/04/15/happy-motoring/

Information on other highway milestones in American history is available at https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/candc/timeline.cfm