Mendenhall’s Guide Road Map New Hampshire

An uncommon 1912 road guide to New Hampshire.

In 1905, New Hampshire officially organized its State Department of Transportation and established several major ‘trunk line’ highway routes. These were designed to function like the trunk of a tree, conveying the bulk of traffic to arterial branches. This system gradually expanded over the following decade, until the Federal Aid Road Act of 1916 introduced federal funding and rapidly expanded the pace of construction.

This detailed road map of New Hampshire was published in Cincinnati by the firm of C.S. Mendenhall in 1912. The aforementioned ‘Trunk Lines Built By the State Highway Commission’ are highlighted in green, with other ‘Main Roads’ colored in red. The affiliated numbers do not reflect these route names, but rather their associated listing in the accompanying guidebook. Over thirty in total are provided, each with turn-by-turn directions from the departure point to the destination. Inset maps show the roads around urban centers and popular tourist destinations – Mt. Washington, Portsmouth, Manchester, Concord, Keene, and Nashua. An interesting relic from the early days of automobile tourism, when “motor truck traffic was a ‘menace’ to existing roads, bridges and culverts” (NH Highway History) and the roads were shared with carriages, horses, and cyclists.

Established in Cincinnati and active from the 1880s through the 1910s, C.S. Mendenhall was a pioneering mapmaking firm that played a vital role in transitioning American travelers from the bicycle craze of the Gilded Age to the era of the automobile. While competitors like Rand McNally focused on national expansion, Mendenhall became a regional authority on the Midwest and pockets of the East Coast and Southern states. His detailed maps were usually accompanied by road guides that provided text-based itineraries between specific points, often incorporating local conditions (as in this case).