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In
a controlled-access, climate controlled room in the General Land Office
sits the nation's largest-known map cabinet. And in a compartment
labeled "Jumbo Drawer H" is a Texas-sized Texas map.
“The U.S. Geologic Survey has a bigger map of Texas, but I don’t know
of a larger old Texas map,” said Jean Kilpatrick, one of GLO’s map
experts.
Drawn
by two Land Office draftsmen in 1879, the map is eight by eight
feet square. Though its official purpose was to record areas of public
land still available, it also shows all the existing counties (including
two counties that no longer exist), the extent of railroad trackage
up to the time of the map’s preparation, and, of particular interest,
the state's network of roads.
At the time of the map’s drawing, of course, Texas had no official
highway system. That would not come until 1917 when the legislature
created the Texas Highway Department. But the state had a series of
wagon roads connecting the various towns and cities. (Texas had many
more towns than significant cities in those days.)
“It’s a wonderful map,” Kilpatrick said, pointing to the no-longer
extant Greer
County north of the Red River and just east of what is now the
eastern base line of the Panhandle. Since 1896 it has been part of
Oklahoma. The other ghost county is Encinal,
once located between Duval
and Webb county and
later absorbed by those and other counties.
Chief
draftsman Charles W. Pressler drew the finely detailed map with assistance
from draftsman A.B. Langermann. The giant-sized original was then
published in easier-to-handle sizes by a St. Louis-based lithography
company. Copies of the map hung in real estate offices across the
state for years during the last decades of the 19th century.
Of the men who made the map, not much is known about Langermann, but
Pressler left plainer tracks. Born in Prussia on March 26, 1823 as
Karl Wilhelm Pressler, he studied surveying and cartography in the
early 1840s. Fed up with the state of affairs in his native country,
he immigrated to Texas, arriving at Galveston
on Feb. 1, 1845.
Almost immediately, Pressler began practicing his professional skills
in Texas. He worked for noted land man Jacob De Cordova in Austin
and assisted him in the preparation of his 1849 map of the state,
today considered one of the most important of the early maps of Texas.
Newly married, Pressler went to work for the General Land Office in
1850 and spent most of the rest of his career there. His non-GLO interims
included service in the Confederate army during the Civil War and
for a time after the war as Galveston’s city engineer. As a federal
employee in 1869-70, he did the field work for a map tracing the route
from Austin to Yuma, AZ
and did surveying at seven frontier forts from Jack
County to Laredo.
But Pressler soon was back on the state payroll at the GLO.
The giant map he and Langermann produced in 1879 would have been used
by William S. Porter (later much better known as O.
Henry) when he worked as a draftsman for the Land Office in the
late 1880s. Porter reported to Pressler, and when the future short
story writer later got indicted for embezzling funds at an Austin
bank, Pressler went his bond.
Pressler
stayed at the GLO until 1899. His big map eventually outlived its
original usefulness and got rolled up and stored. With the passage
of time and occasional un-rolling, its condition deteriorated. The
Panhandle region, for instance, pretty much fell to pieces.
But in 2000, the GLO had the map restored. The Panhandle still looks
like it got hit by a giant tornado, but the map has been stabilized
and never will get in any worse shape. (Fortunately, the Panhandle
survives on the small versions of Pressler’s map.)
Because of its size, the king-sized map has not been scanned, but
Kilpatrick says that will happen sooner or later. Until then, 4 by
4 foot versions of the map have been reprinted and are available for
purchase from GLO.
The GLO has more than 50,000 maps and documents in its archives. To
buy a reprint of selected old maps and some newly prepared historical
maps, check the agency’s Web site at www.glo.state.tx.us
© Mike
Cox
"Texas Tales" June
27, 2007 column |
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