In Washington: There's Life in Old Maps

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This is the "sanctum sanctorum," said John A. Wolter, flinging open the door to the vault, which was cool and quiet as a tomb. "And this," he continued, sliding out a drawer, "is absolutely priceless." The item at hand was a map, faded so much that to take it in entire one had to squint. Drawn in 1791, it was Pierre L'Enfant's original layout of Washington. And here and there on the document, bleached so faint by time that the eye could not make out the words, were criticisms scribbled by the era's most brilliant fussbudget, Thomas Jefferson.

"It is fading away," said Wolter. "It hung in a surveyor's office for God knows how many years." It could no longer be shown to the public because it could no longer stand the light. Facsimiles, yes, but not the original. So let us move on, said Wolter; many other wondrous things repose in this safe.

Once in a great while a man and his task are so happily fitted that the combination inspires a benign envy. John Wolter is half of just such an equation; his job is chief of the Geography and Map Division of the Library of Congress. A child of the prairie, seized early on by wanderlust, he turned 60 one recent steamy day, and the cogitation that accompanies important anniversaries led him to say that he was precisely where he wanted to be. He tossed out the remark as he guided a tour through his treasures, smiling like a boy showing off kittens.

"I was born in St. Paul," Wolter went on. "As far back as I can remember I wanted to see mountains, oceans--just see the world. I collected maps, railroad timetables, what have you." Once, he tracked his family genealogically and geographically, the German side that settled in Iowa in 1847 and became hide and fur merchants, and the more footloose English side that came first from Liverpool to Wisconsin and then itinerantly followed the lines of the railroads west. The boy hooked himself on the notion of travel, and in 1943, when he was 18, he shipped out with the merchant marine.

In a corner Wolter now came across a weary acquisition, a globe manufactured in 1882 by something called the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. The big sphere had turned the color of the ducks that hang in the windows of Chinese markets everywhere, and had cracked. "I wouldn't play with it," said Wolter. "There's probably something living in there. We'll have to restore it."

Wolter pulled out a map of Rotterdam. "The Dutch map the devil out of that country. Look here. That's all reclaimed land. It's low country, so they have just had to create a country. See here, every drainage ditch is indicated, every wharf. The tulip areas are down here. Here are the dunes. With the changing and the reclaiming, the mapping has to be precise. They have an artistic flair too."