Memoirs of a Mapmaker

Seeing my hand drawn historical maps on display has given me the impetus to take a look back at the incidents and experiences in my life that impacted and influenced my interest in maps and my career as a mapmaker.

The transatlantic voyage of the Tammy Norie was a major influence in my map making, but a singular inspiration in my interest and love of history came from a trip I took with a friend.

Growing up in a small town in rural upstate New York about 350 miles away from New York City, Manhattan was always in the back of my mind as the most glamorous place in the world to live and work. My shining city on the sea.

A Toddler’s View of New York

I was introduced to New York life when I was just a toddler. My mother, sister and I accompanied my father to a PT Boat reunion in New York. He had captained PT 490 in the Pacific Theatre during WWII. He was a highly decorated officer, winning a silver and a gold star. His fellow skipper was Joe Moran of Moran Tugboats.

My father, in the the white shirt, with my sister and I aboard the Tug Peter Moran.

During the reunion our family was entertained at the Moran home in New York’s most exclusive neighborhood–Sutton Place. This was my beau ideal of New York–and probably everybody else’s.

A College Grad’s View of New York

Skip ahead twenty odd years. Forget Sutton Place. I lived in a third floor walk up on East 74th Street between 2nd and 3rd Avenues. Working as an expediter for a furniture company in the D&D Building, Bloomingdale’s was nearby. I earned enough money to eat and live in a decent neighborhood in Manhattan. Making my own way, on my own terms, managing a comfortable existence–something that would not be remotely possible today.

My mother was visiting one day and we ran into a college friend of mine who I had lost touch with, Zachary Kent. He was working in New York and living in New Jersey. Zach had a car.

Zach  invited me to accompany him on a trip to Gettysburg that he had planned.  I had always been interested in history but concentrated primarily on English and British history—possibly—indeed certainly, because of The Beatles.  After months in a small, cramped apartment, however, a car ride into the country, any countryside, anywhere, sounded like a wonderful plan. So. Gettysburg? Yeah. Great. Never been there–our family trips were always sailing adventures. Dramatic? Yes. But always along the coast and on the water.

A View of Gettysburg

Once in Gettysburg, and on the battlefield we began our tour at the copse of trees where Pickett began his charge and advanced across the open fields toward the stone wall at the foot of Little Round Top where the Union Lines were located.  That experience was a historic epiphany for me. The vividness of that trek, essentially changed my life and made me a Civil War Historian.  History had never been so tactile for me.  It wasn’t words on a page or pictures in a book.   This is where it happened, these were the actual rocks, this was the actual place.  Dramatic? Yes. I more or less took a deep breath and to be honest have never really exhaled.

Zach and I went to the book store at the battlefield–and always a big reader–I bought a few books, not realizing that Civil War books would engulf my library, indeed my life. But the problem was when I read the books, I had to hand draw sketch maps to properly comprehend and mentally visualize the complex and often bewildering movements and actions that I was reading about and trying to understand in the histories. 

At some point I had purchased a Carmen Cope map of the Antietam Battlefield.   Cope had been a veteran of the battle.  It was a large map and very detailed, it fully documented the battlefield, but in black and white it very accurately depicted, but failed, I thought to appropriately dramatize the field.  And my immediate thought was,” I wonder if I can do something about this, maybe I can sketch in a few trees, draw in some corn stalks, color in a few fields….”

The Civil War: Some Suggested Reading

I prepared a reading list of Civil War volumes to hand out to an Olean High School junior year American history class as part of a Civil War presentation on Jan. 15, 2013. The list is short and sweet and my basic premise was that, for the most part, none of the students had read much, if anything, about the Civil War. My intention was to suggest some books that would be scholarly but entertaining and informative at the same time.  Also the list had to fit on one page. This is the list I came up with. My feeling is that if any of the students read even one of these volumes they will probably be drawn to read others as well.

  •  Bruce Catton’s trilogy on the Civil War, which includes The Coming Fury, Terrible Swift Sword, and Never Call Retreat, is a very dramatic and beautifully written set. It’s accurate history but it reads with the verve of a novel.  A pretty long novel though.
  • Bruce Catton also wrote a terrific little book entitled U. S. Grant and the American Military Tradition. It’s one of my absolute favorite Civil War books. And it’s short!
  • There are two excellent one volume biographies of Abraham Lincoln.  Stephen B. Oates’s With Malice Toward None and/or Benjamin P. Thomas’s Abraham Lincoln.  Another really neat little book is this same Benjamin P. Thomas’s Lincoln’s New Salem.
  • The best single volume account of the overall Civil War—it’s pretty long and quite detailed but extremely worthwhile—is James M. McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom.
  • There are all sorts of truly fascinating first person accounts of being a soldier in the Civil War.  These books are America’s Victorian literature.  We don’t have a Dickens, a Trollope, a Thackery, an Eliott…but we do have these.  And they’re not only thrilling and entertaining but they’re also true.  There are dozens of these but two of the best are: War Years with JEB Stuart by W.W. Blackford and I Rode With Stonewall by Henry Kyd Douglas.
  • The Blue and the Gray, edited by Henry Steele Commager, is a chronologically arranged collection of excerpts from contemporary accounts of the Civil War.  The entries are usually short.  They’re like intellectual snacks.  But the selections were chosen because they gave the illuminating sense of “being there.”
  • If you’re feeling really ambitious, there’s a fabulous set of volumes by Carl Sandburg (he’s the poet)—2 volumes entitled The Prairie Years, and 4 volumes entitled The War Years.  Together they constitute a superlative biography of Lincoln and the American cultural and political environment in which he lived and governed. Make yourself a promise to read these volumes some time in your life.
  • Finally there is an ongoing series The Civil War: Told by Those Who Lived It, which will consist of four volumes published by Library of America.  McElfresh Map Company prepared the endpaper maps for each volume.