Thaddeus Fowler more than mapping genius
From time to time — in curio shops, at booths in the center of malls, at estate sales and summer flea markets — you might run across an authentic slice of Americana — a bird’s-eye map of a city or town, including many western Pennsylvania towns.
Look for them; they’re worth your while.
For better than half a century after the Civil War, bird’s-eye mapmakers roamed the country producing hundreds of such maps. There are bird’s-eye maps of Kearney, Nebraska, and Portland, Oregon, Los Angeles, California, Cherryfield, Maine, Grafton, West Virginia, and Ogden City, Utah.
There were 219 bird’s-eye or panoramic maps made of communities in Pennsylvania. Most are the work of one man: Thaddeus Mortimer Fowler.
Did I say maps? What Fowler executed was so much more. He drew streets, buildings, trees, railroad cars, railroad tracks stretching into the horizon, bridges, factories and people — yes, people — rendered by one or two simple strokes of his pen.
And all of these were seen from a perspective of maybe two or three or four thousand feet above the surface of the earth.
The maps are sweeping and expansive. They are invitations to dream; to imagine just what was going on, down there are on the ground, a century or more ago.
Fowler was a craftsman performing a type of mapmaking that was hardly a mystery to the handful of practicing professionals in the mid-19th to early 20th centuries.
There was a method to configuring a town from that perspective and in that detail. But to the uninformed, the whole thing has an amazing quality. As for the imaginary leap into the air, it required a superb imagination as well as an authentic professionalism honed over the years, town map after town map.
Bird’s-eye maps were rooted in the civic boosterism of the time. America was changing, the industrial tide was rising, and individuals were imbued with a “go-go” attitude.
The spirit of “forward progress” was infectious and animated both small towns and big cities. Civic fathers wanted to show off their communities in the best possible light. And so map-artists were called upon, though they also arrived in towns unannounced.
“It couldn’t have been an easy life,” John Herbert of the Library of Congress once told me. “I imagine them getting off the train and marching off to see the leading citizen and making their pitch.”
A Civil War veteran, Fowler had been drawing bird’s-eye maps for better than 30 years by the time he made the rounds of western Pennsylvania. He was an itinerant, and he was largely unknown, even late in his career. Jailed in the midst of World War I in Allentown, suspected of being a German spy, he called on family members from Morrisville, Pa., to bail him out.
It normally took Fowler four to five weeks to complete a map. It was time well spent. Fowler and his contemporaries created images that allowed Americans to experience their towns and cities in new ways.
What was true then is true today.
On the Library of Congress web page, it is easy enough to call up Fowler’s America. A simple mouse click or two can focus your attention on the Fowler map of Uniontown, rendered in 1897. The Fayette County courthouse and some surrounding buildings on East Main Street appear very much as they do today.
Fowler’s Greensburg includes the Kinderhook section of town, the familiar dome of the Westmoreland County courthouse, the train station and St. Joseph’s Academy, now Seton Hill University.
The Dunbar map shows Dunbar Creek flowing toward the Dunbar Furnaces plant. Railroad tracks criss-cross the town. Empty lots wait for development. There are maps, similarly detailed, of Mount Pleasant, Waynesburg, Point Marion, Brownsville, downtown Pittsburgh, Myersdale, Monongahela. The list goes on.
Thaddeus Mortimer Fowler died on the job, taking a spill on an icy city street on a March day in 1922. He never lost his energy or enthusiasm for his craft. Writing to his granddaughter near the end of his life, Fowler noted that bird’s-eye mapmaking remained an “unadulterated joy.”
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Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown and is the author of two books — Grand Salute: Stories of the World War II Generation and Our People. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail .com.