Wisconsin Public Television University Place  Old Maps, New Stories Susan Krueger  10/29/13 UP938  cc >> Today we are pleased to introduce Susan Krueger, Wisconsin Historical Society's map librarian, for our Wisconsin Historical Museum's History Sandwiched In lecture series. Susan will tell us about the Wisconsin Historical Society's extensive map collection and how it's been used by genealogists, treasure hunters, and hobbyists. The opinions expressed today are those of the presenter and are not necessarily those of the Wisconsin Historical Society or of the museum's employees. So without further ado, please join me in welcoming Susan. [APPLAUSE]  >> Thank you. All right, I will be presenting Old Maps, New Stories, and let's just jump in. I'm going to be talking a little bit about what I do at the Wisconsin Historical Society, a little bit about the collection of maps and atlases there, and then we are going to kind of get an overview of some different sorts of maps we have and ways that they get used. So let's jump in. Here's a behind-the-scenes picture of the map drawers where a lot of the maps are stored. The Wisconsin Historical Society map collection numbers about 25,000 sheet maps and 3,000 atlases. 

It's been built since 1854. Most of the maps, almost half of them, are from Wisconsin, but the collection does range throughout the US and Canada. Focuses of the map collection include early exploration of the Americas, history of Wisconsin and the Great Lakes region, and we also have a extensive collection of plat maps and atlases. And -- what I'll throw out is the earliest map we have dates back to 1513. About 5% are predating 1800. My experience with the maps there is as map librarian, and I spend most of my time cataloging. When I started working there about three years ago, the maps were only accessible through a paper card catalog. Who here still uses paper card catalogs? I'm working to get them online so they're available through the UW catalog and also worldwide through a catalog called WorldCat. Kind of a partner project with my job is the digital project. We're working on getting 20% of our maps online. 

Right now we have about 5,000 sheets. And I'll highlight some of the maps we have online later.  Yeah, we've added about 7,000-8,000 to the online catalog, and we're hoping to keep working on that in the next two years. And a quick thank you to the Caxambas Foundation who supports my job and a lot of the digitizing going on of the collection. All right, now, map lovers need to brace yourself for the next slide. [LAUGHTER] So, map use, here's an overview. I talked to a lot of the reference librarians at the society, and I love maps. They are so packed with information. There's so much potential, but a lot of them are used for basic utility things. And here's a slightly outdated overview of the sorts of people coming in. 

Mostly scholars and genealogists, but also including a big slice of other. And now I'm just going to start in. So, one of the big categories of map use is scholarship. I just included one of my favorite historical maps up there by a fellow named Increase Allen Lapham. Quite a famous, within Wisconsin, scientist and geologist. He was quite the scientist. His interests ranged. More specifically, one of the more interesting map uses recently is a independent scholar by the name of Stan Courtney. He's looking into the history of Native American rock art, and he was researching the history of this picture on the right here of the Piasa Bird. If you drive through Alton, Illinois, you will see this. 

And in the margins of some of our old maps, the early explorers to come through these areas, in this example Jean-Baptiste Louis Franklin noticed these same drawings up on the rocks there. So he was going through a lot of our early historical maps looking for mentions of this and found this picture. You can kind of compare and see the Piasa Bird kind of used to not have wings. Local history is another big category. I wanted to highlight one of the types of maps we have for this. We have a lot of these beautiful, they're called bird's eye views or aerial views. The Historical Society has over a hundred original copies of these as well as about 300 including facsimiles and reprints. These are really great for getting an overview of the community. You can see down to individual buildings. Originally, these were mostly made for home and business decoration as well as to promote the community. 

And if you had a business, if you wanted to sponsor these maps, you were more likely to be mentioned down in these references that say where your place of business is. And this, Kilbourn City of course later became Wisconsin Dells. Another local history example highlighting use of some of our land ownership maps, somebody researching where local names came from. These are a great resource for this. The Google map I'm using here just to illustrate where this Dempsey Road is. And the researcher looking for this found this old map of Madison showing this used to be Dempsey's farmland. So you can kind of trace back to see the places that people lived and gave their names to later. Also great for getting an overview of, if you look at a bunch of these in a row, you can see how the communities expand. You can get an idea of land use. Often they'll have the locations of rural buildings and the land owners. 

 Kind of another interesting category that I've noticed is personal history. This isn't one that exactly comes to mind, but I've noticed a lot of self-biography going on where, for instance, we had an elderly Monona resident come in wondering, he remembered working on a farm as a teenager and wanted to know where this farm was. He remembered that the farmer's name was Mather, and he once saw it on a map somewhere. So we found this map from 1911 showing where the farm was. The farm was later demolished from suburban expansion after World War II. A similar situation, somebody remembering, as a boy, going to a resort in northern Wisconsin and wanting to research where it was. And we also have quite a collection of tourist maps and old road maps and such and found this map that happens to have a hotel directory. Sometimes it's really helpful when you're doing research that there's marginal information that can also be useful on maps. Directories, business directories, illustrations. And, in this case, we did locate where his resort was. 

It later became the location of the Flying Eagle Resort off Basswood Lake near Delta. A big genealogy use, of course. The Historical Society, we get a lot of genealogists coming in. Land ownership maps are kind of priceless for this. If you can find an ancestor who lived in a rural area, especially if they owned a farm, there's a chance that you can find exactly which parcel of lands they owned. You can see who their neighbors were. You can see nearby cemeteries, churches, what roads they probably traveled. A really kind of close, personal look at ancestors. And, again, a lot of these old wall maps with land owners have some of this marginal information. All right, moving on to a quick category which I found particularly interesting: treasure hunting. 

This is, of course, just a commercial map by Rand McNally highlighting the Bogus Bluff area where there's a rumor of money stashed by a gang of counterfeiters. There's rumors of French coins being stashed from fur traders, and there's rumors of Spanish coins being looted from river boats and hidden after being stolen by gangs of Indian warriors who stashed it there for safe keeping. I don't know how seriously you can take these, but they are really fun to look at. Kind of a more realistic treasure hunting scenario that is kind of controversial is Indian mounds. It's estimated that as many as 15,000 of these Indian mounds existed. A lot of them were being destroyed by urban development and by farming. So the Wisconsin Archeological Society went through and mapped them all out in an effort to preserve them. But, kind of coincidentally, also a popular activity at the time, up through the early 20th century, was relic hunting. It was really fun for people to go in and see what they could find. So it was kind of one of those situations of mapping these out to protect them, but then also letting people know where they were for more -- purposes. 

Of course, Indian mounds are all protected today, and hopefully they all get registered, also, through historic preservation efforts. In a similar vein, using maps for historic preservation, also documenting the location of later cemeteries, including family plots from small communities and families. The early years of the Burial Sites Preservation Program made extensive use of our maps and all other maps that they could find to create a database of these family plots. And the map I have here kind of touches on a separate controversy. If anybody's heard in the news about the Racine Mound Cemetery, somebody came up with a map that shows a certain parcel of land there as an ancient work. And this plot of land is in the works to be sold to a family to divide into burial plots. So there's a big controversy there, kind of sparked by a map, to figure out is it an Indian burial mound, and, if so, it would not be available for splitting up. It would be protected. Another use for historic preservation is with buildings. Whether it's your family home that you want to research, a house you're interested in, or historic commercial buildings and such. 

The example I put up here is located here in Madison up on East Washington, the Gisholt Machine Company, and this building is still there.  To make the nomination for this, the folks who were developing the nomination did extensive research with our Sanborn Maps, which is another type of map I would love to highlight. Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps, and other fire insurance maps, where made from early on in the late, sorry, late in the 19th century on, about the 1860s onward, and they're really a rich resource because they're very incredibly detailed. They record exact footprints of buildings. They record construction materials, story heights, where windows are, so you can go back and see how the building was originally. They also mapped communities repeatedly over the years. So if you can find separate years, you can compare when additions were put on, you can see the changes in community buildings over time. So they're a great resource, and they are another one of the resources that we are working really hard to put online because of copyright, pre-1927 maps. So these are really exciting. The Wisconsin Historical Society has 400 Wisconsin communities, many of them mapped over several years. 

 Another one of the uses we have is just making reproductions. Maps, as many of you would probably agree because you're here being interested in maps, they're great to look at. They're great to put up as decorations. The example I have here is a modern map we made of the Peshtigo fire burned area. One of the stores in the Peshtigo area wanted to display this map on the wall of their business. It's also great to display historic maps via reproductions because it protects the originals from sunlight and wear. One more example of reproductions, if you ever go to Old World Wisconsin, we made some reproductions of maps for them recently to hang on their wall in the schoolhouse. Historically, you'd have the big wall rollers and you'd pull it down for the students to look at the maps. Some hobbies uses. I'm going to highlight the Kaysen Maps for this one, if there are any railroad enthusiasts here. 

James P Kaysen was a historian professor who went through and on over a thousand topographical maps he annotated the location of old logging railroads. He would also write histories of lumber companies and railroad companies in the margins. This is a really rich resource if you're interested in railroad history. Some of the uses these are seeing are somebody in Vilas County is working on developing an Android app so that if you're hiking, you can find in real-time where these are and follow them on your hike. Ozaukee County is also using these to plan an expansion of their bike and hiking trails. Railroad beds are kind of great for that kind of thing.  All right. Education, of course. With the Wisconsin Historical Society headquarters located right on UW campus, we get a lot of students coming in. And kind of infamous among the staff is the wave of students coming in to do their place papers for Professor William Cronon's class. 

They learn to use research methods and historical sources by writing a place paper on somewhere of their choice. And it's fun to see all the uses that they get. The website I have there is just from his website explaining historical map use methods.  Another use, there's an increasing trend towards GIS, or geographic information systems. The Wisconsin Media Lab is planning on using some of our historic Wisconsin maps to make some interactive resources for grade school students. This is a separate project that they've already finished, which is also kind of cool. You can toggle different features, and it matches up with their resources which focuses on Native American history and culture.  And use as art. Maps are really rich resources, but they're also just kind of inspiring and fun to look at. This map, made by Sean Weitner, is part of a Kickstarter project for The Secret Atlas of North Coast Food. 

He looked at a bunch of our -- pictorial maps from the 1930s to 1950s for a freewheeling way to influence his own art. And if you're interested in seeing some of those fun pictorial maps, they're part of the map exhibit out at the museum right now on the central pillar.  A more historical art use, we do have all these older maps that have just beautiful Cartesians and other illustrations in the margins. And the Chazen Museum of Art next spring is going to be producing this exhibit on art in marginalia. It looks really fun, and they're going to be borrowing several of our materials to display, including, if you didn't get a chance to see the first modern atlas, the Ortelius Atlas, which we own, it will be on display there as well.  And that kind of concludes our whirlwind tour through map use at the Historical Society. [APPLAUSE]