If you want to know how to get from Canal and Washington Streets to 5th and Jefferson Streets in Huron, Ill., the only map around to consult was drawn in 1836 by a young surveyor named Abraham Lincoln.
His plat map of a town that was never built will be available for reference starting Nov. 2 at the Field Museum as part of the city’s “Festival of Maps,” billed as the biggest show of rare and important maps ever assembled. Thousands of maps — among the rarest, most important and beautiful ever created — are to be featured in coming months at 30 institutions.
The unusual collaboration of so many cultural organizations around a single topic was the brainchild of the Field Museum, the Newberry Library and private collectors who for years had dreamed of launching an exhibition of history’s “100 most important maps,” said Chicago industrialist Barry MacLean, a map collector.
But the more organizers talked, MacLean said, “We realized there were a lot of other extraordinary maps that wouldn’t make the list of the top 100 but would be exciting to display, so we decided to expand.”
The organizing committee eventually brought in 37 participating institutions, including the 30 signed up as exhibit venues.
“Everybody has a different idea of what a map is,” said MacLean, chief executive officer of MacLean-Fogg Co., a supplier of automotive, energy and telecommunications components. “The [Chicago] Botanic Garden will have a show of maps illustrating how seeds are spread by wind and birds, why a certain tree will grow in one place but not 100 miles away. Brookfield Zoo will have maps showing the migration of animals.”
The Field Museum will stage the centerpiece exhibit for the festival from Nov. 2 through Jan. 27. That exhibit, “Maps: Finding Our Place in the World,” features many of the 100 “greatest” maps among the 130 artifacts it has pulled together, borrowing from collections held by the Vatican, the British royal family, libraries and other collectors around the world.
Lincoln’s plat map of Huron, surveyed and laid out along the Sangamon River, is on loan from the presidential library in Springfield. That map is one of the more conventional items going on display in the Field exhibit, organized jointly by Field and Newberry Library curators. They brought in world-famous documents by Mercator, da Vinci and Tolkien as well as not-so-famous maps, such as an accurate depiction of the Greenland coastline carved in driftwood by 19th Century Inuit fishermen.
“We deliberately set out to stretch visitors’ ideas of what a map can be,” said Newberry map curator Robert Karrow.
The Field exhibit shows how maps not only help travelers get from place to place but have been vital to scientific discovery. It boasts a 19th Century map British physician John Snow made to pinpoint a particular London well as the culprit in a cholera epidemic, disproving the prevailing idea that cholera was spread through the air.
Also included is the world’s first geological map, 200 years old. The map would shine a light for Charles Darwin as he formulated his theory of evolution, piecing together the orderly progression of fossil life found in geological formations.
One of the more unusual maps is owned by MacLean: a powder horn carried by a British soldier through the French-Indian War in Upstate New York before the American Revolution. The soldier had incised on the horn exquisite maps of the Hudson and Mohawk Rivers from New York City to Canada.
“We’re displaying it alongside some of the latest hand-held global-positioning devices of today,” said James Akerman, director of the Newberry’s Hermon Dunlap Smith Center for the History of Cartography, with the idea of demonstrating that portability of mapping devices isn’t exactly a new idea.
The Newberry Museum will trace the rise of the American West, beginning with very early exploratory maps. The exhibit shows Chicago’s growth from a tiny dot into a metropolis and key transportation center. The Chicago History Museum will show off historic mapping techniques that recorded population densities, changing infrastructure and transit systems through Chicago’s history.
The Art Institute has rare maps of Paris from 1789 through 1914, and the Special Collections Research Center of the University of Chicago has 16th Century maps of Rome. The Oriental Institute has brought in extensive loaned collections showing the Ottoman Empire and its cities as depicted by European mapmakers between the 15th and 18th Centuries.
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The tortured national histories of Lithuania and Poland come alive in maps displayed at the Balzekas Museum of Lithuanian Culture and the Polish Museum of America.
Northwestern University Library is displaying its outstanding collection of antique maps of Africa. The University of Illinois at Chicago is showing its collection of maps and photographs of the city’s Near West Side, collected in the course of more than a century of studies by sociologists, social activists, housing advocates and community planners.
Going out of this world, the Adler Planetarium is putting together an exhibit on mapping the universe. It features an object never before displayed because of its size: a 6-foot-tall celestial globe built about 1630 by Dutch cartographer Willem Blaeu, who depicted the constellations as though he was in space well beyond them, looking back at Earth.
The list goes on, from big museums like the Museum of Science and Industry to smaller institutions like the Spertus Museum.
“To our knowledge,” MacLean said of the festival, “we know of no other city or group of institutions that has ever tried to do something on this scale.”
Many individual museums will offer their map displays free or free with usual admission fees. The Field Museum is charging $19 for adults, $14 for seniors and students, and $9 for children, which includes museum admission.
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