Libraries at University of Nebraska-Lincoln

 

Date of this Version

March 2008

Comments

Originally published (1891) by the Hoye Directory Company. Electronic edition published 2008 by the University of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries.

Abstract

“Being a Complete and Accurate Index to the Residents of the Entire City, Their Names, Business and Location. Together with a Carefully Prepared Business Directory; An Elaborate Appendix of Indispensable Information Concerning Churches, Societies, Banks, City, County, State and Federal Records, Etc., Etc. To Which Is Added a Full and Complete Street and Avenue Directory, Corrected and Compared with the Latest Surveys, and Therefore Official. Also a Complete Directory of the Resident Tax-Payers of Lancaster County, Exclusive of the City of Lincoln.”

Commercial and residential directory for Lincoln, Nebraska, 1891, when the city was in the midst of a phenomenal population boom. In 1880, it had numbered less than 15,000 residents; by 1890, that figure was over 55,000, a level it would not reach again until after 1920. The directory contains 16,201 names, often giving occupation and employment, residence, and sometimes race (“col’d.”) or marital status (“wid.”). It also contains every typeface, banner, decorative rule, and ornament in the printing office. It is approximately 540 pages (at least 1 leaf is missing from the frontmatter).

The source for this electronic version of Hoye’s Directory of Lincoln City for 1891 was a copy originally scanned by the University of Nebraska–Lincoln’s E-Text Center for a digital project under the direction of Timothy R. Mahoney titled Gilded Age Plains City: The Great Sheedy Murder Trial and the Booster Ethos of Lincoln, Nebraska, which will be coming online in the spring of 2008. The volume was scanned to avoid repeated handling of its very fragile pages. Scanning was done in full color at high-resolution, producing tiff files of about 15 MBytes for each page. The files of the entire work add up to almost 9 gigabytes. The Office of Scholarly Communications accepted the task of working this material into a form that could be posted online for use by the general public. Adobe Photoshop was used to convert the color tiff scan files into monochrome bitmaps; these were saved as pdf pages, combined (by Adobe Acrobat) into one document, and “optimized” for size. The final version weighs in at about 22 megabytes, about 1/400th of the original size.

The work may be of interest to historians, genealogists, typographers, demographers, and miscellaneous others.

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