Antique map prints depicting railroad and Interurban routes

[keesindy]

If you have an interest in antique maps, particularly those depicting railroad or Interurban routes, you might find these store additions interesting.

These prints were created from scanned images of a folded pocket map my great aunt had in her library. The map wasn't in the best condition and I didn't scan the entire thing because of its deteriorating condition and the overall size. So I scanned portions of central Indiana (where I live) and reluctantly decided not to do the remainder.

I spent quite a few hours joining the smaller scanned sections together and then cleaning up the scanned images to make the map more readable and to fill in a few holes in the paper where city or town names were missing. This infilling was done by carefully copying and pasting individual letters from other parts of the map to replace missing letters. a few of the holes in the paper were not repaired due to their complexity and time constraints. Besides, they're a reminder of just how old this map is!

[philatarium]

Beautiful work, as always, Tom!

-- Dave

[dianealthea]

Such an oddity to have, I wonder if she did a lot of traveling by train, one sees old stuff like this and can think of a gazillion stories it has to tell. You did a really nice job on it, Tom.

[keesindy]

Thank you, Dave and Dianne.

I don't know that Aunt Virginia traveled by train very much. However, her father worked as a railway mail clerk all his life. So that may have been part of her interest. More importantly, she and her husband were enthusiastic collectors of all sorts of historical items. Their home wasn't just cluttered. It was stacked floor to ceiling, with barely space to walk through some rooms. I suppose I sold 20 to 25 19th and very early 20th century pocket maps for Aunt Virginia. This was after her husband died and she was beginning the long process of clearing some of the stuff from the house. Some of those maps proved to be very valuable. The oldest was an 1835 pocket map of the US.

Their library was a thing to behold. Thousands of books, many of which were related to their (professional) genealogical research. I believe it was the largest such library in private hands. After my uncle was diagnosed with cancer, much of the library was donated to the genealogy research center in Salt Lake City and to the similar facility at Fort Wayne, Indiana. The antique maps as well as atlases and numerous 19th century histories were a part of that library, but were not sent to either Salt Lake City or Fort Wayne.

I spent some time helping my cousin go through the things in the house after his mother died. It was amazing—lots of rare and quirky things of historical interest. It has taken over two years to clear the house out, not because it was a big house but because it was so crammed full of stuff.

[dianealthea]

Our older relatives tended to keep things. It too took my sister and I two years to clean out 3 outbuildings, not to mention every cubby hole inside... no maps though... bummer because I truly love them... and strange how my house and my sister's has been, uh, all of sudden filled up with some of our parents "stuff"... we figure when the economy turns around some of it just might be marketable...

[keesindy]

I went through the same thing when Dad died. He was a carpenter and woodworker with an extensive (30' x 30') shop at home. I made many trips back home to clean it up and help Mom get ready for a woodworkers' dream sale. In the process I brought home tools and hardware to add to my own small shop. I also brought home quite a bit of hardwood lumber for making picture frames. A decade later, most of that lumber is still sitting here! I've made a few dozen frames in that time period, but really haven't made much of a dent in the stack of lumber. Too little time!

My grandparents weren't so bad, except for the chairs. For years they had bought cane bottom chairs at estate sales to re-cane, refinish and resell. However, when Granddad died and Grandma moved to the nursing home there were still 75 of these unfinished old chairs at their house!

I'm trying to keep our accumulation under control, but I'm not sure I'm winning that battle.

As far as maps are concerned, I've had a love affair with them and geography since childhood. I think there's probably some relationship between my love of old hand-crafted maps and my love of the engravings on stamps from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. My favorite college class was cartography. The prof asked if he could keep my final project to show as an example to future classes. I let him keep it, but wish now that I still had it.