1932 Pictorial map of Ohio and West Virginia
DESCRIPTION
Ohio and West Virginia are depicted together in this excerpted pictorial map from Berta and Elmer Hader's 1932 Picture Book of the States, pairing Ohio's Great Lakes manufacturing cities with West Virginia's Allegheny coal country.
The sheet runs from Cleveland and the industrial Great Lakes shore south through Columbus to Cincinnati on the Ohio River, and across West Virginia's Kanawha and New River gorges to the Allegheny ridges near the Virginia border. Portrait and historical vignettes crowd the sheet, among them four Ohio-born presidents, a concentration unmatched elsewhere in the book, and La Salle's 1670 exploration of the Ohio River valley, the region's earliest recorded European contact. The reverse carries a corresponding fact sheet for the book's North Carolina and South Carolina entry, a consequence of the book's binding structure, in which each state's descriptive text appears on the verso of the preceding map leaf.
Berta Hoerner Hader (1890–1976) and Elmer Stanley Hader (1889–1973) were a husband-and-wife illustration team among the most celebrated collaborators in American children's publishing, having won the Caldecott Medal, the highest honor in American children's book illustration, along with two additional Caldecott Honors. Picture Book of the States, their 1932 collaboration with Harper & Brothers, covers forty-eight states and the District of Columbia across twenty-eight illustrated leaves, each paired on its facing page with keyed descriptive text so that map and text could be cross-referenced at a glance. The result renders the American landscape, its industries, natural resources, and notable personalities, in the Haders' characteristic whimsical style, informative and warm at once.
CONDITION
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