Carl Little – Jane Crosen and Maine’s Pictorial Map Tradition

My brother David Little has a thing about maps. In all four books we have worked on together, David insisted we include some cartographic images to help orient the reader to the territory we were covering: Mount Katahdin, Acadia, Portland, and Penobscot Bay.

David takes particular delight in pictorial maps, i.e., those that feature vignettes and illustrations. This genre goes back centuries, to the times when mapmakers sometimes relied on fantasy to fashion their visions of the Earth’s contours and inhabitants. Artist Anneli Skaar created a brilliant book built on images of whales mistaken for islands found on early maps from around the world.

For Art of Penobscot Bay, David tracked down a wonderful rendering of the region by Ruth Rhoads Lepper (1905–2011). Lepper’s 1970 Map of the Maine Coast from Rockland thru Schoodic, to Corea offers vignettes related to the Penobscot Bay region, many of them linked to seafaring history, including the Maine Maritime Academy’s training ship State of Maine. Near the center of the map, Lepper included the site on Islesboro of the “first scientific observation of an eclipse of the sun by Americans” in 1780. Lepper developed her love of mapmaking while drafting for the US Navy during World War I. “Maps are precise, time-consuming projects,” she once wrote, “but if your work gives you pleasure, what the heck.”

As David has noted, an entire volume could be written about the pictorial mapmaking tradition of Mount Desert Island. “The diverse content, styles, and types of maps,” he writes, “evolved in tandem with the discovery, exploration, and tourist development of the island.” Augustus “Gus” Phillips (1898–1975) and his brother Luther Phillips (1891–1960) created some of the most cherished maps of the island. According to Nancy A. Kandoian, author of the essay, “‘Supreme and Distinctive’ on the East Coast: The Mapping of Acadia National Park” (1994), their maps “gave visitors reminders of the cultural and natural associations they may have experienced in the area; for the artists/cartographers, they seem to be an expression of affection for the area.”

Sunrise on Acadia, 1966, highlights Phillips’ style of mapmaking. Among the vignettes is a rendering of a patache, the vessel on which the explorer Samuel de Champlain sailed.

Contemporary mapmaker Jane Crosen is a fan of Augustus Phillips, whom she describes as “a fellow self-taught mapmaker who developed his own style in creating maps celebrating Maine’s most scenic and recreationally important regions.” Like her predecessor, she will add a vignette to a map as illustration and an “expression of affection.”

Maps first intrigued Crosen when she studied four fifteen-minute topos that her Grandpa Crosen had spliced together and hung in the family’s cabin on Beech Hill Pond, framing central Hancock County. Crosen writes “I loved the style of the vintage maps showing the pond and surrounding landscape.” In 1991, she created her own map of this beloved place, highlighting the creatures found at the pond.

After two years at Brown University, Crosen spent a semester in London, and then lived for three years in Scotland at the Findhorn Community, where she learned editing, illustration, and graphic design skills working in the publications department. While there, she also began doing calligraphy. On returning to Maine, she learned typesetting while working at a printing company and small newspaper in Portland and doing calligraphy on the side.

Crosen spent two years at DeLorme Publishing as in-house editor and Girl Friday. She learned a great deal working on projects for David DeLorme, including how to make maps using the photomechanical technology of those times, namely, creating color separations in layers using Mylar transparencies.

With DeLorme poised to transition to GIS, GPS, and digital mapping, Crosen moved to Brooklin for a job at WoodenBoat Publications. While working as part-time typesetter, art assistant, and copy editor, she began doing map illustrations drawn in ink with a fine brush and labeled with her own calligraphy for Canoe magazine and WoodenBoat.

With each map commission, including endpaper maps for nautical books, Crosen refined her skills. When the inspiration came to make and self-publish a map of the Blue Hill Peninsula, her series of hand-drawn, stippled one-color maps began. Larger, more detailed two-color maps of Maine’s coastal regions followed, with Crosen using the same layered photomechanical graphic-design techniques she had learned at DeLorme but drawn completely by hand with water areas shaded in ocean green rather than stippled.

Crosen conducts in-depth research for each map. She tries her best to “frame” each region with a balanced composition, combining elements and information from both nautical charts and topo maps when first making a rough. She then meticulously creates each “portrait of place,” using the shorthand of a legend and symbols to keep the maps clean, uncluttered, and timeless. She draws all the calligraphy labels, symbols, and decorations (including border and compass rose) by hand, then reduces and pastes them onto the base map in an intricate collage. For the water, she uses a separate shaded overlay on frosted Mylar.

As an explorer, Crosen especially loves watery places, and her style evolved to showcase Maine’s watersheds from inland and nautical points of view, minimizing roads and unnecessary labels and details, while making each map as accurate, informative, and timeless as possible. Her maps are about the landscape, highlighting cultural heritage, recreational access, and landscape features, while omitting anything commercial or likely to become outdated. “Every map,” she avers, “tells its own story about a place.”

Among Crosen’s popular maps of Maine are several parodies. Sea of Iniquity and Approaches was her first and favorite, and it provided the inspiration for the mermaid compass rose she uses as her logo. She traced a chart of the Downeast coast in reverse and then made up the place names, from South Camisole to Panic City.

Crosen also made a seal-themed chart, a one-off commissioned by boatbuilder Dick Pulsifer, commemorating a meet-up snafu: he and a friend planned to meet up in Seal Harbor but got their wires crossed and sailed into different Seal Harbors. The place names are spoofs on all things seal.

The Osher Map Library in Portland included Crosen in Women in Cartography in 2015. Curated by Alice Hudson, the groundbreaking exhibition covered centuries of map-making, highlighting the contributions of women to the history of mapmaking.

Many more Maine mapmakers past and present deserve attention. One thinks of Mildred Burrage (1890–1983) whose maps have been the focus of talks by author Martha Frink and Maine historian Earle Shettleworth Jr.

Shettleworth has also celebrated the bird’s-eye views of Maine towns and cities, another great tradition. Kirsten Sparenborg Brinton revives that practice in her 2017 bird’s-eye view and parish map of Eastport, Maine, commissioned by the Tides Institute and Museum of Art. Brinton surrounds the view with images of various landmarks, creatures, industry, and other elements of Maine’s easternmost city. Like Crosen and her predecessors, she enhances place through pictures.

 

In a recent email exchange, Jane Crosen reflected on her current projects:

CL: What are you working on now?

JC: My work in researching, making, and publishing maps has evolved more and more in the direction of landscape interpretation. Over the last fifteen years, I have developed a series of “map-sleuthing” slide presentations pairing map details from all kinds of maps—historic, geological, topographical, nautical—with current and period photos, in sequenced narratives highlighting important stories and historic features of Downeast Maine’s heritage landscape, including many remnants still here today.

Along the way, I discovered Colby’s 1881 atlases of Hancock and Washington counties. Learning they were out of print, I embarked on publishing newly arranged editions with Colby’s archival maps grouped geographically, accompanied by period photos, captions, and excerpts for historic context. Launching my new Coastwise editions has prompted more slide talks, and I have been writing a few spinoff articles on the atlases and Maine’s mapping history.

 

[ Crosen discusses her life as a mapmaker on Peter Neill’s podcast “Conversations from the Pointed Firs.”]