![De Wit 1672 [Osher Collection]](http://usm.maine.edu/maps/sites/default/files/MatthewEdney/featured_maps/map-image/world 1672 de wit large 20pc.jpg "De Wit 1672 [Osher Collection]") |
Current Exhibition:American Treasures October 18, 2009 - August 21, 2010American Treasures celebrates the reopening of the newly renovated and expanded Osher Map Library and Smith Center for Cartographic Education at the University of Southern Maine. It explores the library’s rich and varied collections and its mission to preserve those collections and make them accessible. Beginning with the foundational gifts by the Smith and Osher families, the library’s collections emphasize Maine and New England, followed in order by the United States, the Americas, and the (continued) |
(click on image to view in greater detail) | PENOBSCOT LAKE QUADRANGLE N4545-W7000/15 Washington, DC: USGS, 1956 |
UNITED STATES GEOLOGICAL SURVEYThe initial topographic surveys in Maine (1898-1908) were of the populated coastal areas, except for a spur inland along the Kennebeck River (45). Most of interior Maine was not mapped thoroughly until after 1920, and the far north not until after 1945 (40, 43, 46). The government surveyors focussed on the physical features of the landscape: relief (shown in brown); hydrography (blue); and, in later editions, forest (green). Using guidelines established in Washington, the surveyors mapped (in black) only those cultural features that were part of American life: township and county boundaries, schools, roads, railways. The surveyors also used the property owners--mostly Anglo-Americans who had arrived after the railroad--as their sources for the names of rivers, lakes, and mountains. The result was the definition of an almost entirely American cartography of the region, one which erased many of the Abanaki place-names established by earlier, more locally committed mapmakers. 40-48 |
