caitlinswisher.files.wordpress.com · Web viewThere is no rule or law that white citizens can’t be buried in the black cemetery or vice versa, that’s just the way things are

Caitlin SwisherApril 6, 2012Honors Comp II

Chandler, OK

Lakes of Chandler

As you can see from these Google map images, I am from a teeny-tiny town

called Chandler. These maps really intrigue me because in my town, we don’t use

Swisher1


these street names. We have our own names for everything, and if you can’t find

what you’re looking for from our names, you’re out of luck!

I used two map images for this project, but I am not comparing the two

images. The top image is of my entire town. You can see everything except for the

lakes, which are north of town. The bottom image is zoomed in on the two lakes.

You can see my housing complex in this image, and the Chandler Municipal Golf

Course.

The two lakes in Chandler are officially named “Chandler Lake” and “Bell Cow

Lake”. I have lived there all my life and never knew this. To me and the other

residents of Chandler, the lakes are referred to as “Old Lake” and “New Lake”,

respectively.

On the left hand side of the top image, you can see labels for “Oak Park

Cemetery” and “Clearview Cemetery”. These are the only two cemeteries in

Chandler, and I’m not proud of our names for them. Chandler is a very old town; it

was established before Oklahoma actually became a state. Therefore, for a part of

its history, Chandler was strictly segregated. To this day, the cemeteries are

segregated. “Oak Park” we refer to as “white” and “Clearview” we refer to as “black”.

There is no rule or law that white citizens can’t be buried in the black cemetery or

vice versa, that’s just the way things are still done. You’re buried where your family

is buried, and your family is either in the “black” cemetery or the “white.”

On the right side of the same image, you can see where our McDonald’s is

found. Just to the right of this is Atwoods. I have always known the road in front of

Swisher2


Atwoods to be “Wal-Mart Road” because the building Atwoods occupies used to be a

Wal-Mart (what the people of Chandler lack in imagination they make up for in

common sense). This map taught me that I’m actually looking at 1st Street.

Similarly, there is one street in Chandler where almost all of our shops are located.

Our pharmacy, restaurants, movie rental store, hair places, and lawyer’s office are

all conveniently bundled onto this little strip. We call this “Main Street”, but it is

actually “Manvel Avenue”. Who would have thought? I wonder who this Manvel

was.

I cannot identify the person who authored this map. I don’t believe it was all

computerized, because someone had to go in and decide which places where worthy

of being labeled, and which were not. In other words, someone had to generalize

the content. We learned about this practiced in Chapter 3 of “How to Lie with

Maps”. It states “content generalization promotes clarity of purpose or meaning by

filtering out details irrelevant to the map’s function or theme” (Monmonier 35). If

we go off of the labels this author provides us, it is conveying my town as a place

with a lot of dead people, little value for education, and home of two fast food

restaurants.

Unfortunately, the two measly fast food restaurants are true. All we can

boast of is a Sonic and a McDonald’s. While I have no proof, I’m fairly certain that

Chandler has a relatively similar number of dead people as other towns its size.

Maybe the cemeteries are included because they take up a large land mass area. Just

to the right of Oak Park Cemetery is our junior high and high schools, however, and

Swisher3


they were not included. If I was making this map, and I was worried about the two

labels overlapping because of their close proximity to each other, I would have

chosen to label the schools, along with their neighboring sport complexes, instead of

the cemeteries. There are not very many reasons to come visit Chandler, but we do

get a lot of relatives coming in for graduations, sporting events, plays, and other

school functions. It would just make more sense to make the school easier to find on

the map. It can be concluded then, that the map was not made to cater towards

families or in order to make children’s activities easy to find. Going off of this, I say

that the intended audience of this map is people looking for the Route 66

Interpretive Center. It’s our large, historic landmark/museum. We get a lot of

bikers and other tourists coming in to see this, and it’s featured on this map. If this

is really the case, the purpose of this map is to provide only the historic landmarks

of Chandler. The ones I could find on the map are the Route 66 Interpretive Center,

Indian Springs Park, and the two cemeteries (they actually are historic just for being

segregated).

This map originally caught my attention just for having different names for

places than what I was used to. The world isn’t impressed with our little names for

our little landmarks, streets, and buildings. They want to know the real, official,

clean-cut names. But as I paid more attention to these official labels, I became

aware of what labels were left off, and what was chosen to be labeled. At first I was

alarmed that places that were so important to me, such as the golf course, the

schools, and the sporting complexes were not included on the map. But after

Swisher4


further deliberation, I see that the labels they did include were placed to appeal and

attract tourists, bringing business to my small town.

Swisher5


Works Cited

Monmonier, Mark. "Chapter 3-Content." How to Lie with Maps. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago, 1996. 35. Print.

Chandler, OK, Screenshot, Google Maps. Personal photograph by author. 2012.Lakes of Chandler, Screenshot, Google Maps. Personal photograph by author. 2012.

Swisher6

caitlinswisher.files.wordpress.com · Web viewThere is no rule or law that white citizens can’t be buried in the black cemetery or vice versa, that’s just the way things are

Documents