Article

Mapmaking and Printing
The Growth of Mapping
Land Grants

Technological advances in papermaking and printing which permitted quick and inexpensive reproduction of maps greatly benefited railroad cartography. Before the introduction of these new techniques early in the nineteenth century, maps were laboriously engraved, in reverse, usually on copper plates, and printed on hand presses. Although the results were excellent, this slow and costly process could not keep pace with the demand for railroad maps. The process of lithography which was invented in 1798 by Alois Senefelder of Bavaria, came to America at an opportune time, just as the first railroad charter was being granted in 1815. This invention revolutionized map printing and provided the means for inexpensive map reproduction. Within two years after William and John Pendleton established the first important lithographic printing house in Boston, in 1825, their firm was printing railroad surveys and reports for the earliest New England railroad companies.¹³

Even after lithographic printing in map production became common, engraving was used for many years for the finer and more limited works. As late as 1848 Peter S. Duval of Philadelphia engraved map plates of Virginia for Claudius Crozet, principal engineer to the Commonwealth.

Technical advances were quickly adapted to map printing. The transfer process eliminated most of the laborious procedure of drawing on stone in reverse. It allowed an illustration or a newly drawn map, using specially prepared paper and ink, to be transferred directly to a stone or a zinc plate. The early use of "zincography" in America, in 1849, is credited to P. S. Duval's Swiss shop foreman, Frederick Bourquin. Zinc plates were adaptable to the rotary steam power press, which was first installed by Duval in his Philadelphia lithographic establishment.

Another important printing process, cerography, or wax engraving, was introduced in America by Sidney Edwards Morse, whose father, Jedidiah Morse, published the first geography book in the United States, Geography Made Easy, in 1784. The process was first used in 1839 for Morse's "Cerographic Map of Connecticut" and in 1842 for the Cerographic Atlas of the United States. This was an ingenious method of making a mold from which a printing plate was cast. On a thin layer of wax applied to a copper plate, lines and symbols, and later type, were inscribed or impressed. Through the means of an electroplating process, a relief mold was produced from which single sheet maps were printed. The process was kept secret by Morse. It became more widely used after Rand McNally introduced its "wax engraving process" in 1872.

From the 1870s through the first four decades of the twentieth century, this method of printing, sometimes called "relief line engraving," became very popular with large map printing houses in the United States. The firm of George F. Cram and Company, well known for its railroad maps and other geographic publications, adopted the process in the 1880s with the introduction of its Universal Family Atlas of the World. Matthews-Northrop and Company and Poole Brothers also used this method for printing their numerous railroad maps. Multicolor printing, the development of photolithography, and the offset press further accelerated railroad map production and greatly reduced prices.¹⁴

Map of the territory of the United States from the Mississippi River to the Pacific Ocean.
Drawn by E. Freyhold (1858)
Source: The Library of Congress American MemoryThe wealth of data derived from the Pacific surveys stimulated cartographic activities. The data used in compiling twenty-two large individual maps published with the thirteen handsomely illustrated volumes of the Pacific Railroad Survey,¹⁵ for example, was the basic source material for Lt. Gouverneur Kemble Warren's "Map of the Territory of the United States from the Mississippi River to the Pacific Ocean." With Warren's map the work of the topographical engineers on the preliminary Pacific surveys came to an end.¹⁶

The accelerating flow of new information, Warren recognized in his Memoir to Accompany the Map, made it difficult to keep such a map up to date. He said that "the work of compilation . . . must necessarily be frequently repeated; and to aid the future compiler, I have prepared the accompanying memoir upon the different maps and books used, and upon the manner in which their discrepancies have been resolved." He gratefully acknowledged the work of Edward Freyhold in "the beautiful execution of the topography upon the map." The first revision, drawn by Freyhold, was engraved on stone by Julius Bien of New York. A copy of this map is preserved in the Library of Congress President Millard Fillmore Collection and bears his signature and the date December 19, 1863. This map, like the first edition, lists forty-five major surveys and mapping reports from the time of Lewis and Clark to the General Land Office Surveys of the late 1850s.

The Civil War provided another stimulus for railroad mapping because of the strategic importance of rail transportation to the armies. After the war, railroad builders became aware of the traffic-generating potentials of the scenic wonders of the West.

The second half of the nineteenth century was the era of railroad land grants. Between 1850 and 1872 extensive cessions of public lands were made to states and to railroad companies to promote railroad construction.¹⁸ Usually the companies received from the federal government, in twenty- or fifty-mile strips, alternate sections of public land for each mile of track that was built. Responsibility for surveying and mapping the grants fell to the U.S. General Land Office, now the Bureau of Land Management. Numerous maps of the United States and individual states and counties were made which clearly indicated the sections of the granted land and the railroad rights-of-way.

Map of Kansas and Nebraska (1865).
Source: The Library of Congress American MemoryLand grant maps were frequently used by land speculators to advertise railroad lands for sale to the public. As early as 1868 most western railroads established profitable land departments and bureaus of immigration, with offices in Europe, to sell land and promote foreign settlement in the western United States. Consequently, the Library of Congress collections also include some foreign-language maps aimed at both the immigration already on the East Coast and the prospective one in Europe.

Competition between speculators may have led to the idea of the distortion of railroad maps to emphasize one state, area, or line to the advantage of the advertiser. This idea, derived from the government land grant maps, may have been perpetuated by the mapping of the Illinois Central Railroad after it was granted land along its path in 1850. In John W. Amerman's book entitled The Illinois Central Rail-Road Company Offers for Sale Over 2,000,000 Acres Selected Farming and Wood Land (New York, 1856) appears an "Outline map of Illinois" which emphasizes the Illinois Central Railroad by a heavy black line, with stations placed evenly along the line to give the illusion of proximity of towns along the lines. This practice of manipulating scale, area, and paths of railroads became common practice in advertising maps of the 1870s and early 1880s and in railroad timetable maps.

Coming next in Part 3 – Map Publishing Firms and Early Twentieth Century Map Publishing

Endnotes
¹³ "Single Rail Railway," [With lithograph plate by Pendleton. Boston, April 30, 1827] No. t.p.; date from end of article.
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¹⁴ David Woodward, The All-American Map (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), pp. 26-36.
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¹⁵ Reports of Explorations and Surveys, to Ascertain the Most Practicable and Economical Route for a Railroad from the Mississippi River to the Pacific Ocean 1853-1856 (Washington, 1855-59). Published in a quarto set of thirteen volumes and commonly known as the "Pacific Railroad Surveys," it contains narratives of the explorations and accompanying maps of the surveyed routes.
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¹⁶ Warren, Memoir, pp. 66-82.
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¹⁷ Alfred Runte, "Pragmatic Alliance, Western Railroads and the National Parks," National Parks 48 (April 1974):14.
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¹⁸ Haney, History of Railways, 2:13.
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