Utah in 1916 - Salt Lake City, Ogden, Provo

This map of Utah was published in 1916 by the Clason Map Company of Denver as part of their pocket guide to the state, a folding sheet issued with a thirty-two-page descriptive text and index inside cardboard travel covers priced at twenty-five cents. Clason specialized in practical guide maps for the new motoring public, and this edition is printed in outline color by county with local auto roads and transcontinental auto roads distinguished on the sheet, designed to be folded into a pocket and carried on the road rather than displayed on a library shelf. It captures Utah nine years before construction began on a numbered federal highway system, when interstate motoring still depended on privately mapped named routes strung together by guide publishers like Clason.

The Great Salt Lake anchors the map as Utah's dominant natural landmark, instantly recognizable to any motorist consulting the sheet. Local auto roads are marked connecting Utah's towns at a county level, the everyday routes a traveler might use to move between settlements. Transcontinental auto roads are distinguished from these local routes, tracing the longer named highways that were beginning to carry automobile tourists across the entire country. The accompanying thirty-two-page index gave travelers a written companion to the map, letting them look up towns and routes rather than relying on the sheet alone. Together these features capture Utah at the dawn of the automobile age, when maps like this one were as much a travel tool as a record of geography.

This map makes a fitting gift for anyone with family memories of early automobile touring through Utah, or for a collector of the road maps and travel guides that marked the birth of American motoring. Utah buyers should note we also carry the state as mapped by Rand McNally in 1879 and by George F. Cram in 1909: this 1916 Clason guide is the only one of the three built specifically for motorists rather than railroad travelers or general reference. It is available unframed in a full range of sizes, from a compact study print to a larger statement piece.