State map exhibit offers snapshot of past

Maps do more than help people who are lost and tell them how to get from one location to another. They can also serve as invaluable historical documents, a means of entertainment and may simply be aesthetically pleasing.

All of the above are currently on display at the Missouri State Archives' "Mapping Missouri" exhibit.

The exhibit features 120 digital copies of original maps from the archives' collection.

"It's a snapshot of how Missourians have understood themselves over the last 200 years," said Terri Durdaller, a spokeswoman for the secretary of state's office. "Each map has something important to tell us about our state."

State archivist Ken Winn said the exhibit has been in development for six years. Finding the maps was the hard part.

"We have 150 million documents. The maps were scattered all over collections," he said. Many of the maps uncovered have never been viewed by the public before because they were intended for government use.

"That's one of the things we want to get out of this exhibit, to make people aware we have these maps," Winn said.

One of those finds was an 1806 town map of Cape Girardeau.

Winn said many such maps were made during the early 19th century because there was a large effort to get an overview of the land in Missouri.

Other maps also reveal the state's history, including land survey maps made by Antoine Soulard from 1796 to 1806.

Soulard served as Spain's surveyor general of the upper Louisiana Territory from 1795 to 1804 and served as surveyor to the Americans from 1804 to 1806.

Soulard was Missouri's first big map maker, Winn said. During his time as a surveyor, Soulard created an important map of the Mississippi and Missouri River basins that was used by Lewis and Clark.

Another important part of American history is on display in a map that depicts the force division between Confederate and Union soldiers in Jefferson City in 1864, used for Gen. Sterling Price's failed invasion of Missouri.

"Mapping Missouri" also features state road survey maps from the first half of the 19th century, a 15-by-20-foot rug that depicts a map of Missouri and computer-generated maps from the 2000 census.

kalfisi@semissourian.com

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