Louis H. Everts: American Atlas Publisher and Entrepreneur

Louis H. Everts: American Atlas Publisher and Entrepreneur

Page 1 Coordinates Series B, No. 11 Louis H. Everts: American Atlas Publisher and Entrepreneur Persistent URL for citation: http://purl.oclc.org/ coordinates/b11.pdf Jefferson M. Moak Jefferson M. Moak worked at the Map Collection of the Free Library of Philadelphia in 1974-1976 and the Philadelphia City Archives from 1987-2000. He is currently senior staff archivist at the National Date of Publication: 06/08/09 Archives at Philadelphia. His publications include: Philadelphia Mapmakers (Philadelphia, The Shackamaxon Society, 1976), Atlases of Pennsylvania (privately published, 1976), and Bibliography of Delaware and New Jersey Maps and Atlases (privately published, 1987). E-mail: jefferson. [email protected] or [email protected] Astract: Louis H. Everts was a native of New York, resident of Illinois, and publisher in Chicago, Philadelphia and Buffalo. His life and business practices illustrate the growth and changes in American county map publishing between the post Civil War period and the pre-World War I era. Keywords: Louis H. Everts, Thompson & Everts, L. H. Everts & Company, The Century Map Company, county map and atlas publishing, county history publishing. Page 2 Louis Humphrey Everts (1836-1924) once described himself as “a very busy and successful man.” He spent most of his career of over forty years in the map and atlas publishing fields. Working within the restrictions of many different partnerships, he created markets for his products where often no market existed. His diverse work, although sometimes criticized by his contemporaries, has proven to contain lasting value for the historian today—for the individual maps, atlases and histories produced under his direction provide insight into a way of life long past. From his beginnings with the firm of Thompson and Everts (1865-1872) to the close of his career as proprietor of The Century Map Company (1902-1913), Everts rode the wave of county map and atlas publishing and, indeed, influenced its course over the years. He experienced many successes as well as the lows of declaring bankruptcy and entering a retirement home for itinerant volunteer soldiers owing to his financial straits. With few business records available, cartographic and local historians must rely primarily upon his vast publishing output to determine his true impact on the map and atlas business of the mid to late 19th century.[1] He claimed publication of “over two hundred” works by 1884. One should not doubt his claim, but no full bibliography of his works exists to verify it. His business methods may foil any attempt to compile an exhaustive list of his projects, but his identified work proves that he had the acumen necessary for marketing his products, and he unquestionably played an important role in the overall development of county atlas publishing in the United States.[2] According to the biography that Everts published in his History of Philadelphia in 1884: Maj. Louis H. Everts, the publisher of this history of the great city of Philadelphia, has qualified himself by long experience and large enterprise for the preparation and issue of local historical work, in which line of business he is not excelled by any competitor in the United States. He had but recently left the military service of his country, when, in 1866, he established a publication house in the West, and as his operations extended, a removal to a more central point of business facilities was found indispensable, and he therefore transferred his headquarters to Philadelphia in 1872. Since then he has been a very busy and successful man. In all he has issued over two hundred local histories, embracing cities, counties, towns, etc., in New York, Pennsylvania, Michigan, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Maine, Ohio, Maryland, Indiana, Tennessee, Missouri, New Hampshire and California. In these many volumes are preserved, in an enduring and concise form, the valuable records of many American cities or other political subdivisions, from the day when they came into existence to that of the issue of the books, a fact the simple statement of which denotes the importance of his publications.[3] Born in East Otto, Cattaraugus County, New York on 14 April 1836 to Samuel C. Everts and Ruth Barnett, Louis Everts spent his boyhood in and around Otto.[4] His name appears interchangeably as Lewis or Louis in pre-Civil War records. In 1850, the Everts family consisted of Samuel, Ruth, and six children: Charles M., Carlos, Cornelia, Lewis, Frances, and James.[5] Samuel Everts’ biographer states that the family left Cattaraugus County in 1851 and settled near Geneva, Kane County, Illinois.[6] After Ruth’s death, Samuel married Lucinda Buck on 11 April 1857, who gave birth to Samuel’s seventh and last child: Edward Arthur Everts on 1 April 1858. She passed away the following year. Samuel’s last marriage occurred on 2 June 1861, to Lucretia Hinckley Van Sickle on 2 June 1861.[7] Louis married Louisa J. Ferson on 22 March 1859 in Kane County. In 1860, the Page 3 newlyweds were living in the same house as Thomas Cooley, a gunsmith, in St. Charles, Illinois. Louis gave his occupation as a clerk. Death soon overtook Louisa later the same year and Louis moved to Chicago where he worked in the dry-goods store of Potter Palmer.[8] Everts did not initially join the military at the outbreak of the War Between the States. After the Federal reverses of Manassas (Bull Run) and Wilson’s Creek during the summer of 1861 proved that the war would last more than a few months, Everts “resigned from the house of Potter Palmer, Chicago, to enter the army, assisting to raise a regiment in Kane County, Ill., and accepting a commission as lieutenant.”[9] The new Kane County regiment became the 52nd Illinois Regiment, also known as the “Lincoln Regiment.” As Everts later noted, he immediately received a commission as a second lieutenant in Company D on 23 September 1861, and a promotion to the rank of first lieutenant on 19 November 1861. The regiment fought both at Shiloh (Pittsburg Landing) in April 1862 and at Corinth, Mississippi, in October of the same year. He became an aide-de-camp to General Pleasant Adams Hackleman prior to the Battles of Iuka and Corinth. Hackleman perished during the latter campaign on 3 October 1862. Everts’ association with Hackleman, who was a personal friend of Abraham Lincoln, eventually bore fruit as Lincoln promoted him, effective 1 June 1863, to the position of assistant adjutant-general of volunteers, with the rank of captain, on the staff of General Thomas William Sweeny, his former colonel from the 52nd Illinois, who now commanded the 2nd Division of the 16th Army Corps. Everts served throughout the remainder of the war in the Western Theatre, participating in Sherman’s March to the Sea and eventually marching in the Grand Review in Washington in 1865. He earned the rank of brevet major of volunteers on 13 March 1865 “for faithful and efficient services during the war.”[10] Everts met a fellow captain and assistant adjutant-general, also serving with the western forces, with whom he would enter business after the war: Thomas Hinckley Thompson. Everts received his discharge on 19 September 1865 and Thompson on 5 December 1865. As Everts recalled in 1900: I entered business at first as Thompson and Everts, he was Quartermaster and I was Assistant Adjutant General of the Division and we were friendly, and when we left the service we started in Iowa in making maps of counties. We were very successful and I saw something in it. We made maps until the Chicago fire [in 1871] when Captain Thompson went into the furniture business and I took his interest. Then I conducted the business alone and made it large and profitable until it was necessary for me to visit Philadelphia and establish an office here.[11] In addition to this 1900 deposition, the primary source of information about Everts’ business activities remains his publications. Bates Harrington, in his expose How ’tis Done, stated that Thomas Thompson started the business in 1864, when he was discharged from the army, and began his operations in Dubuque County, Iowa. Thompson had worked in the cartographic trade prior to his service with the army. His brother, Moses H. Thompson, a civil engineer who operated the map publishing house of M. H. Thompson as early as 1860, published maps of various counties in Illinois.[12] Harrington related that Everts joined Thompson in the fall of 1865, and described Everts as someone who “was remarkably well adapted to the work thus entered upon. The sole obstacle in the way of his prospering was his impaired health. He was smart, active, genial, penetrating in his observation, sanguine of success, enthusiastic, and an unusually good judge of human nature.”[13] Harrington then detailed many of the operations and methods of Thompson & Everts. He later mentioned that his object was to concentrate on the “operations of one firm, on account of the perfection to which they brought their business in so short a time.”[14] Page 4 The first known publication by Thompson and Everts is a county map of Jackson County, Iowa, in 1867 (although Harrington stated that the two had worked on maps of Dubuque County and Jones County, Iowa, before then). At that time, they gave their publication address as Anamosa, Iowa, located in adjoining Jones County. In the following year, Thompson and Everts published a combined map of Scott County, Iowa, and Rock County, Illinois, by which time they were established in Geneva, Illinois. During their work on this map, the two engaged Captain Alfred T. Andreas as an assistant.

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