In Washington: There's Life in Old Maps

By Gregory Jaynes

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."

On a wall near by was a poster, a blue-jeans advertisement featuring a naked fanny. Wolter indulges this fancy in his workers. The Geography and Map Division is, after all, in a basement of the James Madison Memorial Building on Capitol Hill--93,000 sq. ft., more than two acres, containing 6,000 five- drawer steel cabinets holding 3,924,000 maps--and it is only natural for laborers in a windowless environment to post themselves the odd eye-catching diversion. And do they labor! Tedious, hard work, cataloging and restoring, among other duties. Unlike some bureaucratic warrens in the District of Columbia, in this office not a single cobweb was seen growing between someone's lower lip and the space bar on a typewriter.

From World War II topographical maps on rubber, showing atolls and Japanese gun emplacements, Wolter proceeded to a section of American county atlases. Drawn up for insurance underwriters years ago, they are invaluable to urban historians, he said. Here is Alachua, Fla., in November 1912. This building had a tin roof, this one was frame-sided and had gas heating. "I ran across an old one of Tombstone, Ariz., the other day. There it was, the O.K. Corral. The O.K. Corral."

Wolter kept knocking around on ships after the war, then went to Korea as % an Army private, then took a few more ships before returning to Minnesota to pick up a degree in geography, then a master's, then a doctorate. He picked up a wife and four boys too, one of whom today is a geographer, which leads Wolter to a pet peeve: "Geographical illiteracy in this country is an absolute fact. In our day geography was addressed as a separate subject, as was civics. Remember civics? It wasn't this bouillabaisse they call social studies today, that hodgepodge. We don't give these kids the education anymore, and I'm not just talking about place locations on a map. We don't give them a formal education on what goes on, and why, elsewhere in the world. How many of them could tell you where Guatemala is?"

Wolter, at the moment, was in China, holding a map drawn in 1635. From there he went on to a scroll map, 60 ft. long, with a silk backing, done in the 1840s. "Some of these are just fabulous," he said, producing a lacquered bamboo fan, early 19th century, depicting Korea and Japan, with a gazetteer of place names on the flip side.

Then out came Samuel de Champlain's 1606-07 effort. "See Cape Cod. The Gulf of Maine. Here is the Maine coast up to Nova Scotia. Look. You can see Champlain's anchorages." Out came atlases on lambskin, kidskin, calfskin. "See how the Red Sea is always colored red?" Atlases with fleurs-de-lis, compass roses, Virgin Marys, ships in battle.

In his office, Wolter allowed that he had got his 20-year pin from the Federal Government and that he couldn't be happier. "There is an old Elizabethan saying: 'Geography without history hath life and motion, but very unstable, and at random; but history without geography, like a dead carcass, has neither life nor motion at all.' "

All well and good, you say, but how is the chief of the Geography and Map Division of the Library of Congress at refolding a road map? "Terrible. No better than the next guy. Those things are awful."