Join us at the Library of Congress on Thursday, February 26th from 5pm to 8pm for Adventures in Topography, a special Live! at the Library event reaching new heights in terrain mapping! This event will feature a collections display, interactive games and crafts, and a talk by Tom Patterson, retired cartographer with the US National Park Service, on the history of topographic mapping techniques.
Sanborn Map Company fire insurance surveyors successfully mapped many thousands of cities and towns across North America, but they were often viewed with suspicion by locals and they were not granted access to every building they sought to map. This post describes what happened when they were refused, and the creative ways they could sometimes get around property owners’ reservations about their work.
A few short years after the United States won its independence, Christopher Colles set out to map the roads of the new republic. Created using a perambulator he had invented, his unfinished map series remains a fascinating record of the northeastern American landscape in the late 18th century.
