Map Talk: “Atlas Lugged”

The first time I saw the atlas was at the 2004 Newberry Library Book Fair. It was propped up next to the door of Ruggles Hall, peeking out from behind a group of other atlases. One of my goals at the book sale was to purchase a used copy of a Rand McNally & Company Commercial and Marketing Atlas. I had wanted my own copy since I had seen one many years before in a library. Designed for many uses including shipping, they show small towns, township boundaries, and railroad line details often ignored by their road atlas cousins but important to locating genealogical records and finding ancestral locations. That summer, my interest in Rand McNally atlases was rekindled by the many examples shown during the Reading Popular Cartography Institute I was attending.

The atlas is a 1904 edition of Rand McNally’sBusiness Atlas—a great-grandfather of the modern version. The bright, gold-gilt lettering on its worn, peacock green cover proclaims it as the Enlarged edition. At twenty-one inches by fifteen inches and tipping the scales at fifteen pounds it is definitely LARGE. Pound for pound, at $20.00, it seemed like a book sale bargain. In spite of its loose cover and some badly worn pages, I thought it was “cartographic kismet” and meant to grace my library back home. What I did not realize during the excitement and bustle of the book fair was that pages (entire states actually) were missing from the atlas, including my home state of California.

Its imperfect condition gave me permission to haul it along with me this spring to a migration lecture I was asked to give at the local Family History Faire. This annual event draws new genealogists as well as experienced researchers from nine counties in northern California and southern Oregon. I elected to pack the atlas as an afterthought to demonstrate the value of older atlases in locating transportation networks-particularly railroads. This atlas was printed at a time when our nation was dependent upon the railroads and it contained not only a list of all railroads operating in the United States and Canada in 1904 but also identified by name each railroad’s lines and spurs on the maps.

The Faire sponsors asked me to give two lectures that detailed migration trails east of and west of the Mississippi River. The morning lecture on eastern migration trails went well, but in the afternoon lecture on western migration trails it was immediately evident that keeping the attention of the sleepy-eyed audience members was going to be a challenge. I was losing them no matter how many stories I could dredge up about the perils and foibles of life along the trails. At that point, I decided to scrap most of the rest of the lecture and bring out the atlas and talk about railroads. This unexpected turn in the lecture did the trick. The size of the atlas alone got their attention. Most had never seen an “old” atlas before. The brightly colored orange, pink, green and yellow hues of the maps with the bold red numbers representing the names of various railroads fascinated them. Through the excited reaction of my students I felt myself transported back to the Newberry Library and recalled the feeling of awe I had when I was introduced by Jim Akerman, Bob Karrow, Pat Morris, and Art Holzheimer to old maps and atlases that I never dreamed existed.

It was not long before the audience began peppering me with questions about the specific locations of small towns. One student asked me whether Tucker Springs in Oklahoma Territory where her grandparents were married could be found. Another wanted to know the location of a particular township in Ohio where his uncle and aunt had had a farm. With each request I was nervous that the necessary map would be missing from the atlas. Each place had a special meaning or significance to the inquirer’s life: a rural burg where a great-grandparent had been born, a town where a cousin was buried during the influenza outbreak of 1918, a place they remembered visiting as a child or as a soldier passing through on a bus on the way to World War II. Amazingly, all the requests to locate places were for maps still intact in the atlas. To my relief, nobody asked about places in California or on any of the other ‘missing’ states.

The lecture concluded on an upbeat note, and as I was packing up to leave one elderly gentleman shuffled up to me and shyly asked whether he could find Cedar, Arizona in the atlas. He was born there in 1914 and many years ago he had driven out through the desert to visit it but had sadly discovered that there was “hardly a brick left on the ground.” He told me that Cedar had been a mining town that ceased to exist when the mines petered out and residents including his family moved on to the next mining opportunity. One bit of magic was left in the old atlas as we found it located in Arizona Territory in the County of Mohave nestled between Arnold Mine and Deluge Wash. I was reminded that day that an atlas is not just a compilation of points, lines, colors and text but a portal to the past capable of transporting us to long-lost places that stir memories that touch our lives in very deep ways. Each point and line represents not only the toil of the cartographer, the engraver, and the printer but the lives of our ancestors who invested themselves in this land.

Melinda Kashuba
Redding, CA

Melinda Kashuba was a participant in the Smith Center’s 2004 summer institute and recently published Walking with Your Ancestors: A Genealogist’s Guide to Using Maps and Geography.