Exploring EnErgy nEws, December 2016, Page 5

Catch “Remember When” Wednesdays on Exploring Energy, sponsored by Big Chief Plant Services.

CLASSIFIEDSRemembeR WhenA look back at the nation’s oil & gas industry.The nation’s, as well as Oklahoma’s, oil and gas industry is rich in history. As part of a new partnership with the American Oil & Gas Historical Society (AOGHS), Exploring Energy will bring you energy stories from the past in each publication. Also catch “Remember When Wednesday” each fourth Wednesday of the month with AOGHS Executive Director Bruce Wells joining the discussion on KECO 96.5’s Exploring Energy show from 8 to 9 a.m. and on 102.3 KWDQ, sponsored by Big Chief Plant Services. For more articles, photos and features, or to support AOGHS, visit www.aoghs.org.

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Traveling from Penn-sylvania to Texas at the turn of the century, Thaddeus Mortimer Fowler created pan-oramic maps of many of America’s earliest oil towns.

Lithographs of Fowl-er’s hand-drawn cartog-raphy - done without a balloon - have fasci-nated Americans since the Victorian Age. The Library of Congress (LOC) today preserves hundreds of his pan-oramic maps .

Panoramic maps were a popular way to de-pict towns during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centu-ries. A surprising num-ber of the lithographs, also called “bird’s-eye views,” captured the small communities near oil and natural gas fields.

Fowler, born in Low-ell, Massachusetts, on December 21, 1842, served in the 21st New York Volunteers during the Civil War. He was wounded at the Second Battle of Bull Run in 1862, and discharged at Boston the next year.

Fowler migrated to Wisconsin, where he es-tablished his own pan-oramic map company in 1870. A panoramic view of Stewart, Ohio, is the earliest Fowler map in the LOC collec-tion.

In 1885, Fowler moved with his family to Morrisville, Pennsyl-vania, where he main-tained his headquarters for the next 25 years as he traveled the country. He began to draw hun-dreds of views of Penn-sylvania, Ohio and West Virginia towns – includ-ing many prospering, thanks to oil.

Fowler’s work includ-ed an 1896 map of Sis-tersville, West Virginia, where an oil discovery four years earlier had found a giant oilfield. The well at Polecat Run revealed the Sistersville Anticline and trans-formed the small Ohio River community.

Historians have iden-tified more than 410 Fowler panoramas. “Thaddeus Mortimer Fowler (1842–1922) was perhaps the most prolific of the dozens of bird’s-eye view art-ists who crisscrossed the country during the lat-ter three decades of the nineteenth century,” ex-plains the Amon Carter Museum of American Art.

“He produced at least seventeen views of dif-ferent Texas cities in 1890 and 1891, but that output is dwarfed by his production of almost 250 views of Pennsyl-vania between 1872 and 1922,” adds the Fort Worth, Texas, museum.

Fowler traveled to Oklahoma in 1890 to map “Oklahoma City, Indian Territory” less than a year after the first land rush. He returned to produce a 1918 drawing of Tulsa, which was al-ready becoming the “Oil Capital of the World.”

How did Fowler cre-ate his maps? Prepara-tion of panoramic maps

“involved a vast amount of painstakingly detailed labor,” explains the LOC.

“For each project a frame or projection was developed, showing in perspective the pattern of streets. The artist then walked in the street, sketching buildings, trees, and other features to present a complete and accurate landscape

An 1896 Fowler panorama of Titusville, Pennsylvania, where Edwin L. Drake launched the U.S. petroleum Industry in 1859. Image courtesy Library of Congress Geography and Map Division

The Library of Congress has identified more than 410 Fowler maps, including this 1918 view of Tulsa.

Fowler published a lithograph of Wichita Falls, Texas, in 1890. For a fee, he would include homes and businesses as map insets. Image courtesy Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth.

A detail from Fowler’s 1896 map of Sistersville, West Virginia, where an oil discovery four years earlier had brought prosperity to the Ohio River town.

as though seen from an elevation of 2,000 to 3,000 feet,” the LOC notes.

This collection of data was entered on the frame in his workroom, and “a careful perspective, which required a surface of three hundred square feet, was then erected from a correct survey of the city.”

Thaddeus Mortimer

Fowler died in March 1922 at age 80, follow-ing a fall on icy streets while working in Mid-dletown, New York. His maps of communities – including oil boom towns – preserve a pic-torial record of urban life at the time.

For some small towns, “aero views” are the only early maps that have survived.