Something on the Origins of the Two Largest Map Collections in the USA and the Practice of Map History
/A brief note re Harvard College and then a look at the Library of Congress, its map collections, and P. Lee Phillips
Note: this essay supplements an earlier blog post on the formation of map libraries in the nineteenth century, which mentioned the origins of the map collections of the American Geographical Society. It is all material that has dropped out of The Map: Concepts and Histories
Harvard College
The first institutional map collection in the USA was that of Harvard College. In 1818, Harvard College acquired the large geographical collection, including some 5,000 maps, that had been assembled by Christoph Daniel Ebeling, the Hamburg geographer, Americophile, and teacher of Alexander von Humboldt, in support of his unfinished, multivolume Erdbeschreibung und Geschichte von Amerika (1793) and the also unfinished accompanying atlas by Daniel Sotzmann (Brown 1940; Ristow 1981; Scharfe 1981). Ebeling’s geographical collections took up a substantial portion of one of the two rooms of the college’s library, in what is now Harvard Hall, Harvard University:
“Plan of the West Library, Room A” (1831–1832), with areas of “maps” highlighted. Not shown here is the other half of the folded sheet, showing the East Library, which seems not to have contained maps. Manuscript, 34 × 21 cm. Harvard University Archives (University Records)]
The library plan shows four sets of flat files, two at the north end, two at the south, and some shelving units in the south-east corner, all labeled “maps.” Close by are shelves labeled “Geography,” “Voyages & Travels,” “American Travels & Voyages,” and “American History” that likely bore many of Ebeling’s books.
The college accepted the collection as a gift from the Boston merchant Israel Thorndike—whose great wealth stemmed from his participation in the Caribbean system of slavery—because it gave access to contemporary geographical knowledge (Denis et al. 2018; Rebok 2019). Indeed, the collection was mined in 1828 by the US State Department for maps relevant to the USA’s northeastern boundary with the British provinces of Quebec and New Brunswick (Elkins 1952).
A Note re Early Map Collecting
The Ebeling collection today is a tremendous resource for map historians—among other things it contains the only known impression of the first map of Portland, Maine, from about 1815—but in 1818 the collection was almost entirely of recent maps showing contemporary knowledge. This was very much in line with practice at the time, when there was little concern for outmoded maps from the past.
In the early modern era, some antiquaries had acquired old maps as part of their accumulation of manuscript relics, most notably the Peutinger and Gough maps, but early maps were not of primary concern to those princes, scholars, and bureaucrats who assembled huge map collections that could run to hundreds and thousands of volumes. Rather, those active collectors who sought to acquire comprehensive collections invariably sought contemporary maps and atlases (Pedley and Edney 2019), an emphasis that would persist well into the nineteenth century. There was an interest in collecting certain early works that possessed a persistent intellectual relevance. For example, Prince Aleksandr Yakovlevich Lobanov-Rostovsky [Labanoff de Rostoff] (1788–1866) perpetuated historians’ long-standing interest in Ptolemy’s Geography as an essential aid in the comprehension of Classical texts when he assembled a remarkable number of early editions of the Geography alongside more recent works on ancient geography; this small set of early works stands out like a sore thumb within the collection of contemporary maps and atlases that he assembled in Paris on behalf of the Russian empire (Lobanov-Rostovsky and Piquet 1823, nos. 12–31). [n1] Cornelis Koeman (1961, 69) therefore concluded that, in this early era, old works were collected as “historia” rather than as “geographia.”
Library of Congress
The creation in 1897 of the Hall of Maps and Charts within the Library of Congress was part and parcel of library’s transformation from a small legislative library into the de facto US national library. During the first half of the nineteenth century, when state legislatures progressively turned their own working libraries into public institutions (e.g., Shaw 2013), there was little sense that Congress’s library should be turned into a national library. After all, the federal government remained limited in scope and authority. During the 1850s—when the USA was engaged in a great surge of westward expansion inspired by the ideology of “manifest destiny,” spurred by the California Gold Rush, and implemented through exploratory surveys for the best routes for transcontinental railroads—some scholars and federal officials did agitate for the formation of a national map collection. The logical host was the Smithsonian Institution, the separately funded and autonomous body founded in 1846 as a clearing house for information about the lands, indigenous peoples, and resources of North America (Kohl 1857). However, Joseph Henry, the SI’s first secretary was reluctant to expand the functions of the institution’s library (see Cole 1971–72, 469; Ostrowski 2004, esp. 145–78; Schulten 2022).
At the time of the US Civil War (1861–1865), the Library of Congress possessed only about 60,000 books and just a handful of staff, who were crammed into odd spaces around the Capitol building. Nonetheless, the war’s expansion of federal authority suggested the need to expand the library as an essential instrument for a growing government. The cause was led by Ainsworth Rand Spofford (1825-1908), appointed Librarian of Congress in 1864. By 1870, Spofford had persuaded Congress to make its library the sole US copyright depository, and to enforce deposition of works as a condition for granting copyright (Cole 1971). Spofford then pushed for the creation of a purpose-built library building to accommodate the library’s now inevitable growth, beginning with an architectural competition in 1873; funding delays prevented construction from beginning until 1890. What is today known as the Jefferson Building finally opened in November 1897, shortly after Spofford’s retirement (Cole 1971–72; Cole 1975).
In line with the idea of a national library, Spofford further acquired materials that spoke to the national history and character of the USA by turning attention away from the political divisions of the Civil War to the common foundations of the US revolution. In 1864, he bought from the historian Edward Everett Hale a collection of 107 colonial and revolutionary-era maps that had previously belonged to the commercial London map publisher William Faden; in addition to printed maps, the collection contained manuscript source materials used for the maps that Faden had published during the revolution and by Thomas Jefferys during the colonial era, which Faden had acquired from Jefferys’ estate in the 1770s (Anonymous 1862; Phillips 1901, 35). In 1867, Spofford engineered the purchase of the huge collection of books, manuscripts, and other materials pertaining to the colonial and revolutionary eras that the printer-publisher Peter Force had assembled since about 1820, a collection that included some 1,200 maps; in doing so he relied on the intellectual and monetary evaluation of Force’s materials by the antiquarian dealer Henry Stevens (Stephenson 1973). And in 1882 and 1883, respectively, Spofford further acquired the revolutionary war maps of the British engineer John Hills and of the French commander, the comte de Rochambeau.
That maps and atlases should form something of a distinct category of materials within the Library of Congress is suggested by the inscription added by Mark Twain to the impression of his satirical map of the fortifications of Paris that he sent in September 1870 to his old friend Spofford. Twain facetiously asked that Spofford “preserve” his absurdist map “among the geographical treasures of the Congressional library” (Edney 2019, 11–12). In his August 1873 specifications for the new library building, Spofford understandably emphasized the storage for two million books in a manner that emulated the British Museum’s reading room, but he also pragmatically noted the need for large rooms to house other kinds of non-book materials:
V. Besides the interior space occupied by the circular reading-room and the system of book alcoves radiating therefrom, provision is to be made for eight rooms of large dimensions, not less than 40 to 60 feet diameter, and 20 to 25 feet high, for map-rooms, newspaper files, copyright records, works of art, catalogue-rooms, and packing-room. (Quoted by Brousseau 1998, 476)
An 1881 plan of the proposed building by the winning architects, Smithmeyer and Pelz, included, in the north-west corner of the first floor, an area dedicated to “Rare Maps & Charts” (Brousseau 1998, 369).
By 1878, Spofford permitted P. Lee Phillips, who had joined the library in 1875 after dropping out of law school, to extend his work as a book cataloger to include the identification and cataloging of maps, albeit only during “odd moments spared from [his] other duties” (Phillips 1897, 462). Later, when the opening of the new building was imminent, Spofford (1895, 14) proposed to reorganize the library’s operations across nine divisions, one of which would be for maps and charts; Phillips, already de facto map curator, would be appointed superintendent of the new hall of maps and charts when the new building opened, again located in the north-west of the building (Seavey 1993, esp. 283–86; also Stephenson 1969, 1989; Stephenson 1998; Ristow 1971, esp. 96–99; Wolter et al. 1979). A picture of the map reading room shows P. Lee Phillips (the front figure in the pair consulting a large book on the service desk):
[Levin C. Handy, photograph of the Library of Congress’s Hall of Maps and Charts on the first floor of the Jefferson Building, between 1898 and 1910. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division (LOT 9788)]
As superintendent, Phillips explicitly supported contemporary political needs. The USA was then entering a global phase of imperialism sustained by a reflexive American nationalism. At the same time, the study of early maps was then taking off in the USA, stimulated by the Columbus and Cabot quincentennials. Phillips worked in the new forms of globalist and localist map histories that sustained, respectively, imperialistic and nationalistic ideologies. Building on his map cataloging work in the previous decades, Phillips rapidly prepared chronologically arranged bibliographies of the maps and geographical accounts of the USA’s newly acquired colonies of Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Philippines (Phillips 1898b, 1903) and of its new imperial sphere of the Americas (e.g., Phillips 1902), together with catalogs of early maps enshrining settler-colonial narratives of the mapping of the continental USA and its states (e.g., Phillips 1896, 1901, 1907, 1911). The nationalistic emphasis required of a national map collection was made plain in his bibliography of the library’s atlases: he might have identified all the many atlases, but described in detail only those contents that pertained to the Americas and the USA’s sphere of interest (Phillips 1909–20). Phillips further explained the necessity of using maps and the still-emergent field of historical cartography in boundary disputes (Phillips 1897; Phillips 1898a). In almost all of this work, Phillips engaged with small-scale, coarse resolution, geographical and marine maps and their histories of global and regional knowledge. Even so, as his work crossed between globalist and settler-colonial accounts, Phillips did engage in localist concerns, both for the urban mapping of Washington, D.C. (Phillips 1900, 1917a) and for notable local surveyors and map makers (Phillips 1917b).
Compared to the Harvard’s map collections—at least until it was reorganized in the early 1960s as a separate library by the map librarian and map historian, R. A. Skelton (Mercator 1962)—the Library of Congress’s Geography and Map Division has always possessed a significant historical component to its work.
Notes
n1. The 1823 catalog of the Lobanov-Rostovsky collection listed 2,269 works, ranging from single sheets to multi-volume atlases. Of the 1,660 dated works (also excluding the battle and siege plans, which were dated to the events depicted and not to their creation), 66% postdated the French Revolution and 92.5% postdated 1740, when critical geographical practices had spread from Paris to Europe’s other mapping centers.
Works Cited
Anonymous. 1862. Catalogue of a Curious and Valuable Collection of Original Maps and Plans of Military Positions Held in the Old French and Revolutionary Wars; with Plans of Different Cities, and Maps of the Country. Boston: John Wilson & Son.
Brousseau, Frances Mary. 1998. “The Library of Congress, 1873–1897: The Building, Its Architects, and the Politics of Nineteenth-Century Architectural Practice.” PhD dissertation. University of Delaware.
Brown, Ralph H. 1940. “Early Maps of the United States: The Ebeling-Sotzmann Maps of the Northern Seaboard States.” Geographical Review 30, no. 3: 471–79.
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———. 1971–72. “A National Monument for a National Library: Ainsworth Rand Spofford and the New Library of Congress, 1871–1897.” Records of the Columbia Historical Society, Washington, D.C. 71/72: 468–507.
———, ed. 1975. Ainsworth Rand Spofford: Bookman and Librarian. Littleton, Colo.: Libraries Unlimited.
Denis, Lena, David Weimer, Ashley Gonik, and Dani Brown. 2018. 200: Harvard Map Collection, 1818–2018. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Map Collection, Harvard University.
Ebeling, Christoph Daniel. 1793–1816. Erdbeschreibung und Geschichte von Amerika: Die Vereinigten Staaten von Nordamerika. 7 vols. Hamburg.
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Lobanov-Rostovsky, Aleksandr Yakovlevich, and Charles Piquet. 1823. Catalogue des cartes géographiques, topographiques & marines, de la bibliothèque du Prince Alexandre Labanoff de Rostoff, a Saint-Pétersbourg. Suivi d’une notice de manuscrits. Paris: Firmin-Didot.
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———. 1897. “The Value of Maps in Boundary Disputes, Especially in Connection with Venezuela and British Guiana.” In Annual Report of the American Historical Association for 1896, 1:455–62. Washington, D.C: American Historical Association.
———. 1898a. “Guiana and Venezuela Cartography.” In Annual Report of the American Historical Association for 1897, 681–776. Washington, D.C: American Historical Association.
———. 1898b. “Maps of Cuba. Porto Rico, and the West Indies in the Library of Congress.” In Appleton P. C. Griffin, List of Books Relating to Cuba (Including References to Collected Works and Periodicals), 41–57. Washington, D.C.: G.P.O.
———. 1900. List of Maps and Views of Washington and District of Columbia in the Library of Congress. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office.
———. 1901. A List of Maps of America in the Library of Congress. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office.
———. 1902. A List of Books, Magazines, Articles, and Maps Relating to Central America, Including the Republics of Costa Rica, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Salvador, 1801–1900. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office for the Bureau of the American Republics.
———. 1903. “A List of Maps, Charts and Views of the Philippine Islands in the Library of Congress.” In Appleton P. C. Griffin, Bibliography of the Philippine Islands, 1: 267–397. 2 vols. Washington, D.C.: G.P.O.
———. 1907. “Some Early Maps of Virginia and the Makers, Including Plates Relating to the First Settlement of Jamestown.” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 15: 71–81.
———, ed. 1909–20. A List of Geographical Atlases in the Library of Congress, with Bibliographical Notes. 4 vols. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office.
———. 1911. The Rare Map of Virginia and Maryland by Augustine Herrman, First Lord of Bohemia Manor, Maryland: A Bibliographical Account, with Facsimile Reproduction from the Copy in the British Museum. Washington, D.C.: W. H. Lowdermilk & Co.
———. 1917a. The Beginnings of Washington, as Described in Books, Maps, and Views. Washington, D.C.: for the author.
———. 1917b. “The Negro, Benjamin Banneker; Astronomer and Mathematician, Plea for Universal Peace.” Records of the Columbia Historical Society, Washington, D.C. 20: 114–20.
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———. 1981. “The Ebeling-Sotzmann Atlas von Nordamerika.” Map Collector 14: 2–9.
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———. 1973. “Maps from the Peter Force Collection.” Prologue: Quarterly Journal of the Library of Congress 30, no. 3: 183–204.
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