The $400 Map That Changed Everything

Every great journey needs a map. But the map that guides the Golden Flyer II’s 25-state drive for the Equal Rights Amendment didn’t come from a GPS or a government archive. It came from the basement of a junk shop in Ellsworth, Maine, where it had been hanging forgotten on a wall, slowly crumbling at the edges, waiting for someone to recognize what it was.

Jeryl Schriever, author of Driving the Vote for Women: An American Journey for Suffrage, recognized it immediately.

Jeryl was browsing the shop — the kind of place where old high school rings and forgotten treasures end up side by side — when she wandered downstairs and spotted it. A large road map, dated 1915. The year before Alice Burke and Nell Richardson climbed into their Saxon roadster and drove 10,700 miles across America to win support for women’s suffrage.

The map was deteriorating. The price tag was $480. Jeryl walked away.

Then she went home and thought about it. Then she went back.

The vendor was still there. They settled on $400. And Jeryl walked out with a seven-foot, four-inch piece of American history under her arm.

Here’s the problem with a seven-foot map and a legal-size flatbed scanner: the math doesn’t work. So Jeryl improvised. She scanned the map in sections — piece by careful piece at high resolution — then spent hours at her computer stitching the fragments back together into a seamless whole. Think of it like a jigsaw puzzle, except every piece is irreplaceable and the original is crumbling as you work.

Once the digital version was complete, she hung the original back up, photographed it in full — wooden dowels, wrinkles, age and all — and then superimposed the high-resolution scan over the photograph. The result is something extraordinary: a digital map that looks exactly as it would have appeared to Alice Burke and Nell Richardson in 1916, complete with the texture of age and the roads that actually existed then.

Those weren’t just any roads. On a map that size, only the main roads that actually connected the country made the cut. Every route marked on it was a road that could — with enough determination and luck — carry a 1916 Saxon from one coast to the other.

If you’ve read Jeryl’s book, Driving the Vote for Women you’ve already seen this map at work. Every chapter that follows Burke and Richardson from city to city — from Montgomery to the next stop, from the prairies to the coast — is anchored by an image drawn directly from those scanned fragments. The map doesn’t just illustrate the journey. It is the journey, rendered in the geography of its own time.

The original map now lives quietly in Jeryl’s attic, too fragile to travel. She plans to donate it to Seal Cove Auto Museum in Maine, where it belongs. The digital version, meanwhile, is doing what the original never could: traveling the country, appearing at events, showing audiences what the roads looked like when two women set out to change America.

It’s a $400 map that earned every penny.

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The Golden Flyer II is now on the road, retracing that historic route for the Equal Rights Amendment. Add your name to the journey at here.