Category Archives: McElfresh Maps

Are Paper Maps the New Buggy Whips—Out of Date and Useless?

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Oh, I hope not. Vested interest obviously. But my life veered to maps long, long before that fateful day in the early ‘90’s when my husband told me that he wanted to create maps for a living.

Ever been following GPS to a destination and realize you haven’t the foggiest idea where you are, or worse as you drive along there is an incredible natural formation to the right and you can’t ask Siri what it is  because you don’t have a signal. Frustrating?  You bet! The search for a map is aimless, unless you drive an old car.

I was the nerd in the back seat with a map in my lap following along as my parents drove to Florida the super long way because of my Father’s PTSD, not from his amazing career in the Army, but from his time working at the Pentagon.  Maneuvering the streets in DC really took its toll. He would drive hundreds of miles out of his way just to avoid DC traffic.

It was my Dad that spurred my interest in maps. He was a career Army officer and that career started in 1941 when he graduated from college and was commissioned. Weeks later he found himself in Oklahoma and started his training as an artilleryman. During WWII he sat in tents, using a slide rule and maps, he figured out where to direct the artillery shells. He was really good at it. I hope I saved his slide rule. He taught, correction, he tried to teach me how to use it. It was Greek to me. When Texas Instruments developed calculators with scientific functions, he purchased one hesitantly and not at all convinced. But he was obviously charmed as he gave me numerous TI calculators to aid in my early career path.

My father was stationed as the Professor of Military Science at a university in the early 1960’s. As part of his job, he taught map reading. I found the textbook years later when my neighborhood chum and I played school. In my tiny bedroom, I had a blackboard and we created a desk. We took turns being the teacher. When she was the teacher, she taught English. She went on to be a very successful English teacher. And me, as her first student, became a wordsmith, and a lover of reading and writing. When I was the teacher, I used my father’s textbook and taught map reading. I dare say I was not as good as a teacher as she was, but it sparked an interest that has lasted a lifetime.

My eyes really sparkled in 1993 when my husband said he wanted to create maps. Maps are artistic, even silly computer-generated road maps have a personality. They are informative. Important artists used them in their work. Yes, Johannes Vermeer is up there on my list of favorite artists. And they let you know where you are in the world. Or in McElfresh Map’s case, where Americans made history. And how they maneuvered in the terrain.

We have been in business for over three decades. And if it is buggy whips we are producing, so be it. We have some great things in our archives and will be sharing them as we celebrate our thirty-third year in business.  So stay tuned, or in map terms, keep us on your dashboard.

Memoirs of a Mapmaker

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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….”

It Was 50 Years — Today

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One of McElfresh Map Company’s Influences

With McElfresh Maps on exhibit, I was asked what were my influences. There are many, but a significant one was a family trip…a remarkable one….

Tammy Norie at Whisstock’s Boatyard, Woodbridge, Suffolk, England. June 12, 1969

The First Tammy Norie

As a kid I traveled extensively with my family.   As a member of the Niagara Frontier Ski Team my winter trips were invariably to ski races in distant parts of New York or New England.   One summer, my dad, a WWII naval veteran, bought a 40 foot sail boat and berthed it in Essex, Ct.  That became our home away from home and vacation outing each summer.  Throughout high school, our vessel, the Tammie Norie, a 40 foot Ketch, sailed along the New England Coast and in Long Island Sound. 

The Boatyard Fire

A winter boat yard fire in 1968 in Essex consumed a number of boats including the Tammy Norie.  My Dad was devastated and his search for a replacement vessel was very disappointing.   He ultimately concluded he really just wanted another Tammy Norie.  That meant contacting the original builder in Woodbridge, Suffolk, England and commissioning an almost identical vessel. 

The New Tammy Norie

A new problem…when the yacht was constructed and ready—our sailboat was 3,000 miles away.  Obviously an ocean crossing for somebody was in prospect.  So 50 years ago, at the end of my freshman year at St. Lawrence University, I got to go to England with my family.  My sister and I had been drafted into service as crew.

A Trip to London

We had to spend a day in London to pick up necessary travel documents and as a Beatle fan I took advantage of my proximity to Apple Records in central London.  As chance would have it, as I stood gazing at The Beatle’s town house headquarters in awe, I had the opportunity to sneak in when the door swung open for a messenger to leave.  Although awestruck and bewildered, I managed to grab a few postcards at the reception desk before being summarily ushered out.

The Voyage

I was now ready to sail the high seas with my family and our one recruited crew member, who later became my brother-in-law.  We sailed down the Deben River to the English Channel and through the Bay of Biscay to Madeira off the coast of Africa.  We crossed the Atlantic Ocean propelled along by the same strong, steady trade winds that brought Columbus to America.  We stopped in Bermuda for a brief refit and rest.  We completed the voyage with a six day sail to Block Island and another final short day sail brought us to our ultimate destination, up the Connecticut River to Essex, Ct. 

The Influence on McElfresh Map Company

My Dad was our navigator on this voyage. He relied on essentially the same technology that Columbus used on his voyage in 1492:  a sexton, the sun and the night stars. That became the model for preparing my maps—keep it simple, stick with the old tried and true techniques..

The Miraculous Maps of D-Day

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As we approach the 75th anniversary of D-Day, McElfresh Map Company honors the Engineer Model Making Detachment.  All of these mapmakers knew where the D-Day landings would come, more than a year before June 6, 1944. They were working class and middle class, British and American, men and women.  They came from unlikely civilian backgrounds to be providing indispensable military services.  They were painters, sculptors, scene designers, ornamental plasterers, architects, draftsmen, cabinet makers, carpenters, geographers, teachers, metal workers – there were even toy designers.

The American members were officially in the U. S. Army Corps of Engineers.  The women were the British Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (W.A.A.F) and the other men were part of what was known as V-Section, the Royal Air Force (R.A.F.).

We also honor the pilots that took part in the intensive aerial photographic missions.  Their high altitude photographs were pieced together as mosaics, creating de-facto maps.  Innumerable flights were flown over occupied Europe by aircraft equipped with twelve inch Fairchild cameras, K17 six inch cameras for multiplex mapping and K18 twenty-four inch cameras for large scale coverage.  Spitfires, P-38 Lightnings and Mosquitos flew the missions.  At times, they swooped down low to capture oblique photographs, and the planes returned to England with foliage caught in the fuselage. 

These were ordinary people in extraordinary times doing amazing things in a war the world absolutely needed to be won.

A New Year and New Maps

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I just put the finishing touches on two new battlefield maps. One I had started quite some time ago, put it aside for another map and forgot about it. It’s always nice to find a project in progress. The other map was a bit of a challenge. A family friend asked if I could do a map. Doing a map is easy for me–it’s the research that tends to trick me, but in this case it was more than just the research, it was the weather. I’ll explain.

Stones River Map

Stones River, a battle that took place during the Civil War, was the map I found. I had originally started a version of it for Stephen Sear’s Lincoln’s Lieutenants, an excellent history and a must read if you are interested in the American Civil War.

Stone River, TN Map
Stones River on display at McElfresh Map Company.

I am very pleased with the results of my Stones River map. It is a relatively obscure western battlefield.  The significance of the battle: the relative victory came at a low point in the Union’s fortunes and Lincoln in gratitude thanked General Rosecrans, the Union Commander, saying that had it been a Union defeat instead of a Union victory the nation could scarcely have lived over it.  Later in the war Lincoln mentioned the victory at Stones River and General Grant scoffed that it was no victory.

For Grant, victory meant flags being surrendered, armies being disarmed and marching off the field.  But when an Army has endured a long string of stinging defeats, an outcome only slightly better than a stand-off can seem like a moral victory, a turning of the pages, a new lease on life.  For Lincoln, whose political senses were fine-tuned, the equivocal outcome of Stones River, was to a despondent Union public, a comparative victory at a point in time when an actual, outright defeat, could have been a disaster.

There are cotton fields in the map which are always a treat to do. Many pine trees – always a nice effect. And corn fields, my absolute favorite embellishment—delightful corn stalks with little yellow kernals—dot the map. 

It is always nice to bring attention to the western battlefields which tend to be overlooked.

Bastogne Belgium Map

The other map I finished was Bastogne.  Bastogne was a town that figured heavily in World War II. Family friends asked me to do a map of a battle where their father had fought.  He was a man I knew and greatly admired.  I was thrilled.  But I didn’t want to commit until I knew I could do it.  He documented his service during the battle. Mapping the area in which he saw battle will take a little more research on my part.

Bastogne Map
Bastogne Map on display at McElfresh Map Company. The green is deceptive, it was a very snowy battlefield–a mapping conundrum

But in the mean time I decided to do a study.  Reason being—the weather, how does one do a map and depict the weather.  The winter weather was notorious during the Battle of the Bulge and had an impact on the battle. But how does one, or should one, depict that in a map.  In the end, on my study at least, I opted to go for a green terrain.  Weather, at least in my home base western NY and I’m betting Belgium as well, changes every hour, but the terrain—fields take seasons, trees take years, river courses takes centuries (and can sometimes dramatically change) and those beautiful mountain take eons to take hold.

Currently on the map table: The finishing touches on a small map of Stones River, TN,  the research for the second Bastogne Map, and a very interesting one for me—a local map of my parish and two other local parishs.

And on a Completely Different Note

And on another table, at least for a couple of days – parts of my small collection of Rock memorabilia.  My son’s co-worker is a fan of that era, the music and the rock and rollers.  It was treat for me to bring it all out—especially my short arm Rickenbacker.

Headstock of a Rickenbacker Guitar
Rickenbacker guitar with extra strings just waiting for a new gig.

Happy 25th Anniversary to McElfresh Map Company

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On March 19, 1993 we started McElfresh Map Company on the 5th floor of the First National Bank Building in Olean, NY.  Our first map was the Battlefield of Pea Ridge and the Shiloh Battlefield was on the table.  We didn’t know what we were doing or getting ourselves in to–but it has been an incredibly rewarding and exciting experience–every minute of it.

Torn in Two Exhibit–Ford’s Theater Washington, DC 2012.

Some of the highlights:

    • We have printed and sold over a quarter of a million maps in different formats.
    • In the early days, as we were sweating out the future of the company, and in the same week that the bank nixed our loan application, History Book Club purchased 2,000 of our boxed sets of Gettysburg maps.  We were HBC members and we ordered one–to see how it was packaged.  Imagine our surprise when we received a post card that informed us that they had already sold out.
    • Maps and Mapmakers of the Civil War was published by Harry N. Abrams and is out of print,selling over 35,000 copies. The book resulted in a  presentation at a Long Island bookstore that was taped by C-Span Book TV.  A family friend was visiting during the holidays and woke us up to watch the first telecast–there was no need to wake us up,  the broadcast was repeated many times and is still available on the C-Span website.
    • Our maps have been used by Library of America in their Civil War Series.
    • We have given presentations all over from London to Harvard, Milwaukee to Miami and beyond; our research travels have taken us across the country from Gettysburg to Montana, from Omaha to DC with many stops in between.  With a young family, the kids were usually in tow–these were our family vacations and they were a blast.
    • We have had great customers over the years, some of them are quite famous.
    • We have been kindly helped by many knowledgeable people.
    • We have been given breaks and introductions by so many in the publishing and mapping fields.

    • Letter from Shelby Foote

      Famous historians such as Shelby Foote, Stephen Sears, James McPherson and Sir John Keegan have written appreciative letters.

    • Our maps were on display at the Quick Center at St. Bonaventure University.
    • Our Underground Railroad Map travelled with the Torn in Two exhibit during the Civil War Sesquicentennial.
    • Throughout his Civil War years of study, Stephen Sears was Earl’s idol. And Earl got to work with Mr. Sears when he prepared the maps for Sears’ latest history, Lincoln’s Lieutenants.  It was a personal highlight–a real honor and a treat.

There were times when we struggled and dealt with an unsavory element–all small businesses do.  But would we trade those 25 years for anything else?  Never. Ever. It has been a great run.

Here’s to the next 25 years!

Quick Center Exhibit

A Daybook in the Life — Days 166 and 167

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One of Many–A Journey to Civil War Battlefields

Seat of the War in America, Bacon & Co. — via Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division.

Fri. June 15, 1984—New York and headed south—In the car at 7a.m. Down Fifth Avenue to 34th Street without a stoplight.  One of those new morning—old routine days in Manhattan.  Zach and I underway for the south at 8:30 or so.  A nice, cool, sunny day.  Gettysburg at 12 noon.  Hiked the battlefield, bought some books, watched the electric map (in exactly the reverse order that I’ve described) and generally enjoyed the afternoon.  After going northwest of town to see Reynold’s statue, we headed down Rte. 15, having a bit to eat in Leesburg then stopping for the night in a genuine fleabag near Warrenton.

Sat. June 16, 1984—Virginia—A reasonable start in the rain for Richmond.  We found a nice diner in Culpeper.  I ordered “blueberry cakes” and got some pancakes, covered with a gruesome blue smelling paste.  I ate around it and did fine.  Couldn’t find Kelley’s Ford nor the road leading to Clark Mtn. but we made it to Richmond all right.  Some cute little blonde girl screamed “stupid” at me when I was looking at the map and trying to figure out where to go but otherwise, Richmond was a bit run down and quite placid.  The downtown looked like an extended Olean with a three and four-story building kind of fading in the sun, the signs turning the weary off-color of long exposure.

The Confederate Museum was great, full of artifacts and little bits of business that everybody had been using the moment they were shot.  The presentation was in a chronological sequence and finishing the exhibit you’d pretty well worked your way through the war,  There was a distinctly southern bias to the tone, most notable in the plaque describing the battle between the Monitor and the Virginia .

We drove around a bit.  The Confederate White House was lost, very much like Thomas Wolfe’s “Old Kentucky Home”, amid the glacial looking new buildings, including the Confederate Museum itself.

We went through some real “poor” white neighborhoods in our efforts to get to Hollywood Cemetery.  There was a beautiful, clear blue-eyed girl, tough as a savage, standing looking at us as we hunted up and down the run-down streets for the entrance to the cemetery.  The cemetery itself was impressive in a lush, Southern Victorian way.  It reminded me of a swimming pool emptied out with heavy rock walls and huge Eucalyptus trees towering over the mass of grave stones and mausoleums.  We saw JEB Stuart’s, John Pegram’s, John Tyler’s , James Monroe’s, Jeff Davis’s, Geo. Pickett’s, Fitzhugh Lee’s, and a few other graves—Southall Freeman’s.

Unable to contact Tommy K..  We left Richmond and headed for Charlottesville along Rte 250.  Long straight and rolling ride to the White House Motel.

Stay tuned–the trip continues……

Yes! There is a Method to our Mapness

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As a historical cartographer–one who doesn’t use a computer to draw or to do research, I could be considered a dinosaur, maybe a buggy whip. But details in mapping are important, especially when recreating a historic place–a place that existed when the population of the United States was 55 million, before the industrial revolution, before oil was discovered and  long before automobiles were the prefered mode of transportation.

So how are our maps completed?

I use contemporaneous photographs, taken within days of some of the major battles for Gettysburg and Antietam.  I asked an agronomist, a crop expert, from Cornell  to study the panoramic photos of these fields to determine the crops in the fields. It was easy to figure out what type of fencing there was, where the orchards were, the extent of the woodlands etc. Essential to the use of these photographs was the 1970’s work of William Frassanito, who painstakingly determined the point-of-view and location of each extant wartime photograph of Gettysburg and Antietam.

Then I used regimental histories–each regiment would occupy a small sector of the battlefield and their accounts and maps  would show their particular sector in great detail. The soldiers’ diaries and letters (this was probably the most literate war in history) also contain many references to their immediate surroundings. Many of them were themselves farmers and they would frequently comment on the crops and fields, fences, barns and orchards. The most poignant research items were “burial” maps. Dead men were often buried right where they had fallen by their fellow soldiers, who were usually their townsmen, friends, even relatives. They would then send the family a very detailed map so they could journey to the battlefield, locate the body and bring it home for burial.

On the major battlefields such as Gettysburg, Antietam, Stones River in Tennessee, the National Park Service has tons of data that they gladly make available to a researcher.

Aerial photographs are very revealing if you know what you’re looking for. If I have a reasonably good Civil War era map and it shows a road or a lane that’s vanished, or a barn or a house, if you look very carefully, you can find a footprint or a trace of it. Also, the skeleton features in the landscape – the rivers, streams, hills, principal roads etc. – are obviously extant features on todays extremely accurate USGS maps. So those features are immediately drawn on my map,  providing an immediate reliable framework.

The maps drawn and used by the actual Civil War armies, while not terribly accurate in terms of exact distances and such, are full of the sort of information the armies needed. They wanted the name of residents along the roads because there were no route markers and there were not normally formal names for a given road or lane. The surest way to get reliable directions was to get pointed toward the Smith’s house or the Jones farm. Documenting the residents also gave the armies an idea of the local population. The more residents there were, the more resources there were for the armies to live off. (Union General William Tecumseh Sherman set off across Georgia on November 16,1864 saying, “Where a million Georgians can live, my army will not starve.)

The armies also had to know where they could find corn fields, wheat fields, orchards, hay fields, wells, springs etc. because an army on the march needed to feed 30, 40, 50 thousand men  and thousands of horses and mules. A typical mule would drink 10 gallons of water a day. Multiply that by 10,000! A Civil War army (and it didn’t matter whether they were friends or enemies, Union or Confederate) would devastate any countryside they marched through. They would take all the food for themselves and all the forage for their animals, drink the wells dry, destroy the fields they camped on, empty the barns, clear out the larders, tear down all the fences (to make their camp fires to brew their coffee) and raise havoc generally. But the armies need to live off the land is great for mapmakers because their military “route” maps detailed this sort of food and forage information so the armies knew where they could march and fend for themselves.

A great aid in mapping Gettysburg was the work of John Bachelder, who arrived in Gettysburg immediately after the battle. Bachelder marched up and down the field, mapping it, and he had as a resource the thousands of wounded soldiers, Union and Confederate, remaining behind, who he interviewed. His map, a birds-eye view of the field, was very reliable and valuable.

There were also quite accurate published county maps available of some areas, including Gettysburg, published prior to the Civil War that I used. (They were also used of by the armies and the generals.) Also, soon after the war, the U.S. War Department prepared surveys of many of the major battlefields. These maps were much more detailed and accurate than the maps made under wartime conditions. (The U.S. hired former Confederate mapmakers to work on these surveys. One Rebel named Blackford, who’d sworn he would die rather than live again under the stars and stripes, found himself, within a month of Appomattox happy to be working for the U.S. Army mapping the battlefield

Finally, almost every Civil War battlefield has people who have devoted their lives to studying “their” battle. They know every nook and cranny of the field and like nothing more than to guide someone around the field, point out sites, recommend books and resources, provide access to private lands and to other knowledgeable locals, and in some cases they fix parking tickets incurred locally.

There are other resources but the above provides a pretty good idea of what’s out there. I decide on the reliability of the information based on the resource I used. Photographs, for example, are irrefutable–at least back then they were, before Photoshop.  Other data would often be corroborated by some other data. And then you have to wonder why anybody would mislead about the existence of a stone wall or the presence in their front of a rye as opposed to a wheat field.

After I have everything in place.  I get to add trees and terrain.  I get to print.  I guess I was given the talent of being able to print–very legibly and very small. And finally I get to watercolor.

All my maps are done on a desk that  I found in a barn–it was probably the carriage house for the only New York State governor that hailed from my city.  Unfortunately it wasn’t his desk. I needed some thing flat and this table was tucked away, dusty, covered with some weird tack paper–nobody had used it in years.  I cleaned it up and gave it a second life.  It looked so nice that my landlady wanted it back when we moved.  I offered her $25 for it–I had already completed Pea Ridge and Shiloh and was in the middle of Antietam,  I was rolling.    I can’t remember if she took the money or just let me have it. I am thinking she took it.

  • Top Image: The Wheatfield at Gettysburg Battlefield — Courtesy: Library of Congress

  • Middle Image:  Jedadiah Hotchkiss Gettysburg Map Detail.  Photograph of the original in the Handley Regional Library, Winchester, VA  by Rodney Lee Gibbons, CPP. The map appears in Maps and Mapmakers of the Civil War (Abrams 1999) by Earl B. McELfresh

  • Bottom Images:  McElfresh Map Company’s Gettysburg products.

 

Presentation at the Eldred World War II Museum

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PT Boat 490 Photo Courtesy: McElfresh Map Company LLC

PT Boat 490
Photo Courtesy: McElfresh Map Company LLC

The naval battle of Leyte Gulf was fought on October 25, 1944 in the waters off the coast of the Philippines.  It was not only the greatest naval battle of the Second World War, it was also the largest naval engagement ever fought on the high seas.

In a presentation this coming Saturday at 2:00 PM, October 25, the Seventieth Anniversary of the battle, at the Eldred, Pennsylvania World War II Museum, Earl McElfresh will describe the events leading up to this battle and the part his father, Lt. John M. McElfresh, as skipper of P.T. 490, played in this enormous sea fight that effectively knocked the Japanese navy out of the war.

Lt. McElfresh is mentioned prominently in every account of this battle, which involved 200,000 men and 244 ships, including the two largest and most powerful battleships every launched, Japan’s Yamoto and Musashi.

Crew of PT 490 Photograph Courtesy; McElfresh Map Co. LLC

Crew of PT 490
Photograph Courtesy; McElfresh Map Co. LLC

In a talk entitled, “My Dad vs. the Empire of Japan,” McElfresh will detail the actions of his father as he earned the first of two silver stars awarded to him by the President of the United States: “For conspicuous gallantry as officer in tactical command of P.T.’s 490, 491 and 493 in action against enemy Japanese forces during the battle for Leyte Gulf on October 25, 1944.”

Earl McElfresh of Olean is a Cattaraugus County Legislator and owner of McElfresh Map Company.  The World War II Museum is located at 201 Main Street in Eldred.