The Resuspended City

Near the intersection of two rural thorough­fares—each broad road dotted with horse-drawn hay carts and carriages the size of dimes—stands a wide cemetery of a few dozen graves. Rows of leafy trees project slats of shade over the tombstones, some shaped as simple blocks and others bearing upright crosses. A broad pond sits just north of the cemetery grounds, glimmering dully gray and black within the surrounding pastoral landscape. Almost too small to see, at the cemetery’s arched entrance gate stand two figures, a formally dressed couple approaching the graves. About fifty yards behind them on the path, a family of four makes its way toward the cemetery in a miniature phalanx. The husband wears a hat and coat, his wife wears a dark short-brimmed hat and a black dress that trails in the dirt behind her. Their two children walk between them, a possibly teenage boy nearly the height of his father, and a toddler clutching the mother’s hand. A colossal piece of text, each letter the size of one of the nearby houses, hovers like a low mist above the scene. The people making their way toward the cemetery are oblivious to the floating message, which reads old picotte cemetery. Chances are they know it by a different name: the same plot was variously called Old Picker’s Cemetery, Piggott, Vickert, and Riddle. Prior to these, in 1845 it was officially known as Holy Ghost Evangelical and Reformed Cemetery. Many victims of the city’s devastating cholera epidemic of 1849, which killed nearly 10 percent of the local population, were buried there.

Like plots in a graveyard, sites on a map are the eternal resting places for the once-bustling activity of human life: here lies the halted movement of history. Though the visitors to this cemetery are presumably fictitious mourners—one cartographer’s set of emotional placeholders, akin to the artificial pedestrians of an architectural model—the bodies in the graves, though unnamed, must be actual characters from the city’s narrative.

These immobile acres of life, from the turn of the twentieth century in St. Louis, Missouri, represent only a fragment of the immense panoramic map called Pictorial St. Louis, Metropolis of the Mississippi Valley: A Topographical Survey Drawn in Perspective A.D. 1875. Charted by the nomadic draftsman Camille Dry, the map is widely considered the pinnacle of the form, and one of the more impressive feats of mapmaking in the modern era. Cartographic historians have called it “the most ambitious of all American city views” and “the Sistine Chapel of panoramic maps.” As the largest such map ever...