I Love Maps

Maine has the second largest collection of globes in the country housed at the Osher Map Library on the campus of the University of Southern Maine in Portland. Only the Library of Congress has more. The Osher Library also contains more than 400,000 maps of all kinds and over 7000 have been digitized according to the Library’s web site.

Prior to computers, maps were the best way to organize many kinds of knowledge. As a teacher my classroom was full of them. Seven were pull-downs and I still miss being able to walk over and pull one down like a shade to study it when something happens in a remote part of the world. As things change politically, maps have to depict new national boundaries, especially after wars, but the old maps will always be valuable as historical references.

Topographic maps don’t change nearly as fast — only after a lot of volcanic and tectonic activity. Depending on how extensive the eruption in Hawaii becomes, local maps may need modification. Last month I toured Civita di Bagnoregio — a town perched on the head of a pin which is all that remains of once-thriving Italian town founded by Etruscans over 2500 years ago. In the 17th century it had 2500 people but now only ten live there year-round. Most of the town has fallen away due to earthquake activity and erosion and what remains is a small butte with medieval buildings atop and accessed by a long pedestrian bridge.

Civita di Bagnoregio last month

Maps depict what we know and older ones show what we didn’t know. The earliest printed map of what is now the state of Maine was done in 1793, decades after most towns around where I live in western Maine were established and it was part of Massachusetts. Mapmaker Osgood Carleton didn’t know much about interior Maine, nor the course of the St Croix River which became part of the boundary between the USA and Canada in 1842. There were few surveys and he had to rely on anecdotal data.

Subsequent Carleton maps indicate that Moosehead Lake still had not been surveyed by 1795 and he etched its eastern boundary as a vague dotted line. Nonetheless, there’s a lot of information on these early maps. When I visited the Osher Library with one of its benefactors eight years ago, I witnessed some of its efforts to digitize its extensive collection, a tedious process employing a 60-megapixel camera. Pulling up one of their thousands of digitized maps now, we can zoom in very close without losing resolution.

Astounded by the camera’s capabilities back then, I’ve since purchased a Nikon D850 which was introduced only last fall with 45 megapixels. I had to wait over a month to get it because it’s so popular all around the world. Mapping renders relatively small pictures of very large things, like the entire earth’s surface for one example. By contrast, my new camera enables me to shoot a faraway image with my zoom lens at its strongest, then put the image on my computer and zoom in further to see details I never would have been able to view with my former equipment, or with my naked eye.

Researching for this article, I came across a 1902, birds-eye view of Mount Washington on the Osher web site. If you’re reading this in a newspaper, go here: http://oshermaps.org/exhibitions/map-commentaries/the-eye-of-mt-washington). First published in a pamphlet, it was a piece of artwork as well as a guide, offering then-unique perspectives on our environs in the north country. People couldn’t fly over the mountain back then, but they could pull out their pamphlet and use a magnifying glass to see details only available to eagles.

Before Saco Valley Printing in Fryeburg went out of business, I purchased sets of old county maps of Maine and New Hampshire from both 1858 and 1880 as well as larger maps of Oxford County towns around where I live. They’re slices of history showing old roads and farms no longer in existence —  abandoned and reclaimed by wilderness. Now only stone walls and cellar holes remain, and occasionally dead hulks of what had been massive sugar maples behind which houses and barns once stood.

While I have GPS devices for my vehicles, I also have hard-copy maps in each. When navigating in unfamiliar places there’s nothing like those 21st century GPS devices to get where I’m going, but if I’m not in a hurry, I like to have a real map in my hands to get perspective on where I've ended up. A real map enables me to see what’s over the next hill because I might decide to explore it.