Many years ago, when people still used paper maps, I recall my excitement at the debut of the new edition of Butterworth Cape Cod Atlas & Guidebook. I was about 20 and this was a big deal, mostly because I am a map geek, and the release of a new map was akin to a blockbuster movie release. Also, this was not some far away land that was featured – it was of the Cape – and I am, for better or worse, a yokel.

So it was with great fervor that, soon after turning to the map of Chatham, I found myself taking pen to paper to write to the Butterworth Map Company. Not praise them, but to take them to task with a list of corrections. The name of the road I grew up on was entirely wrong. That was annoying because when you live at the end of a tiny little road you hope UPS and FedEx and friends coming to visit will not give up.

This in the time before cell phones. Now they call 15 minutes after they said they’d be right there – right there — saying, “Where the heck is your road?”

But the other point that raised my hackles was the labeling of the very northeast corner of North Chatham as “Allen Point.” I had never heard this before. To me it was always “Minister’s Point.” And so I told them.

For full disclosure, the Butterworth Company provided me a great incentive. If you wrote to them with a mistake on their map, they would send you a copy of the map for free. No, I am not so much of a Yankee that I expected a map for each correction, although, certainly, I wouldn’t have faulted them for making me such an offer.

Years later I found out that indeed this feature of the land has gone by both Allen Point and Minister’s Point. I prefer the latter, but might concede now I didn’t deserve two maps. Not that I ever expected that, you understand.

But it got me thinking about how many names there have been for the same place. A number of local history buffs are aware that Shore Road was originally named “The Boulevard. ” Clearly, there were aspirations to swankiness when it was laid out around the turn of the last century. At the time I discovered this (and was cajoling the Butterworth Company for free stock), I was working for the selectmen and the surveyor of highways on an inventory of all the roads and ways in Chatham. It had turned out that, big surprise, the town didn’t actually own Shore Road.

So it was high time we figured out what roads the town did own, what the town didn’t own, what it thought it owned but didn’t, and what it did own but didn’t think it did. Indeed, I found a number of each.

The thing that would confound me, however, was the names of certain streets from around 1900. Perhaps you could direct me to Cherry Street? It runs from Main Street to the Boulevard. That could be Seaview Street. Or even Old Harbor Road. In this case, it is now known as Chatham Bars Avenue – which itself was previously Chatham Bars Inn Avenue. I suspect that prior to the building of CBI, it wouldn’t make sense to call it Chatham Bars Inn Avenue. Are there still cherry trees on Cherry Street?

Realizing a map would be necessary to keep some of these straight, I created one and began to notice a theme. The aforementioned Cherry Street. Cedar Street, of course, is still named that. Pine Street, which ran from Main Street to Orleans Road. Any guesses? It seemed someone was in a mood to erase the heritage of Chatham since we know this today as Crowell Road.

As I recall there was also an Oak Street, Elm Street and Poplar Avenue. If you have ever seen photos from this time, Chatham looks like South Dakota. Barely a twig in the place. You can probably guess that the names were chosen then not because they were lined with oaks or cherries or pines. OK, maybe pines, because that’s the Cape Cod state tree. But they were probably all four feet tall. Regardless, the names were perhaps moreaspirational than descriptive. So maybe each street had a single tree on it, but the hope was for more. Someday.

I guess I kind of like this, though. It calls forth not just what this town was like over a century prior – the image everyone wants to have of Chatham – but of a possible alternative history. A Chatham where the railroad depot still functions. Electric streetcars run down Main Street (which is one-way from Cherry Street to Victory Circle). The sailors from the Naval Air Station in Chatham Port are typically found playing ball against the Life Saving Service, and the Monomoy School is located down in Whitewash Village.

A steampunk Cape Cod is a road you can travel down endlessly with Halloween around the corner. Perhaps it suits the season better to think of what could have been than to what has actually been lost.

Come to think of it, that all sounds like a good idea for a map.

Read this and Andy’s other columns online at The Cape Cod Chronicle.