page_title: Mapsco
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Mapsco / History
caption_attribution_description: English: 1955 scan of the Dallas Mapsco (company has relinquished copyright via UTA library donations for old editions)
context_page_description: Mapsco was a privately held publisher of maps and atlases, and was based in Addison, Texas. Universal Map Group, LLC, an affiliate of Kappa Media Group, Inc. acquired the assets of Mapsco, Inc. from Dallas-based Rupe Investment Corp. in March 2010. Rupe Investment Corp. had owned Mapsco, Inc. since 1989.
context_section_description: Mapsco was started by Milton Boyd Keith, owner of several Dallas, Texas, florist shops. Impetus for the first Dallas Mapsco began in 1948 when Keith's drivers kept getting lost, and he decided to make a street atlas booklet for them. Keith spent four years appealing to local government entities to obtain current mapping, but was never successful. Finally, in 1951, Keith approached the Dallas City Building Inspection Division, to obtain mapping data. Their maps were the most accurate produced at that time, but had no index. (The building inspectors at that time just knew where everything was by memory.) Keith obtained the BID maps from the city and began to work in the back of the flower shop at 3323 Oak Lawn Avenue, producing an indexed street map. His shop manager, Lily Kendrick, was instrumental in the laborious process of paging and indexing the city of Dallas into a booklet.
  The first Mapsco Product, the Dallas Street Guide, was printed in 1952, with 3,000 copies produced. The original book covered Dallas and the Park Cities, with insets for Carrollton and Garland, Texas. The book was originally not intended for public sale, and was only to be used by Keith's large fleet of flower delivery drivers. Soon, however, other flower shops began asking Keith and his employees for copies of the books to aid them in their deliveries as well.
  From 1953 to 1955, the Dallas Mapsco was made with a glued back in order to save costs on production. These first few years also saw the production of Mapsco's first product outside of Dallas, and it was not Fort Worth, but much more distant Houston, where Mapsco again became the first company to make an indexed city street atlas. Unfortunately, the endeavor ended poorly when the glued backs disintegrated in the very humid air of that city, and Mapsco has not produced a Houston map since. 
  For the first few years, Mapscos were not available to the general public, being intended for business and delivery purposes. Sales were slow until 1956, when the city of Dallas bought 300 copies for their fire and ambulance services. In 1955, Mapsco had adopted a Roman military style indexing system. The entire map was divided into numbered pages, and each page overlaid with a lettered grid, allowing any street to be referenced by a page number plus a grid letter. In Dallas, the grid index has not changed since then (although the number of pages has expanded greatly). At that time, the city was a bewildering array of street names that matched streets in yet unannexed areas, which led to a lot of confusion. Mapsco was the only accurate map of the newly sprawling Sunbelt metropolis. By the late 1950s a Mapsco map became a status symbol.
  In 1956, Dallas Mapscos began to be sold to the general public from the flower shop. For sales, they hired homeless people off the street. A few books were given to the new "salesman" and if he sold them, he could come back and get some more. If he never came back, they were only out a few books. In 1957, Milton Boyd Keith died and his widow asked his nephew to take over the business. Keith's nephew did not perpetuate the Mapsco but instead took the map bases and formed his own company, called LO-KAT-IT. Keith's widow died soon after, and the Mapsco name all but disappeared. It was about this time that Lily Kendrick, the erstwhile flower shop manager, along with her son Choyce Kendrick, formed a rival company to utilize their mapmaking skills and called it Handymap. The first Handymap was produced in late 1957 and, being more accurate than the rival LO-KAT-IT, undercut its sales. Handymap and the Kendricks were able to acquire the Mapsco naming rights from the Keith family, and the nephew eventually got out of the map business.
  On December 5, 1957, Lily Kendrick became the President of Handymap, making it one of Dallas' first companies to be headed by a woman. Milton Boyd Keith's adopted son Donald became Vice President, and Lily's son Choyce became the Treasurer. Choyce had ten years in the air conditioning business and was unprepared for the challenges of mapmaking. The 
caption: 1955 Dallas Mapsco detail
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