Charles Metsker (2 results)

Condition: Good. Map of Pierce County in Washington State from cartographer Charles Metsker. Metsker began publishing maps in 1901 and the Metsker name lives on at a store in Pike Place Market. Circa 1950's as Interstate 5 is not on the map. Rubbing and staining to the map folder.

Oblong atlas folio. 18 x 14.5 in. 45 leaves, cyanotype blueprints. Including 44 detailed blueprint plat maps, consistently dated 1929 (1 large folding key map sized 24.5 x 14.25 in.). Publisher's flexible simulated calf post-binder, gilt lettering title stamped on front cover, burgundy-coloured silk more pastedowns, neat typed label affixed to upper fore-edge of spine (minor rubbing, shelfwear), NF copy. First edition, thus, of this exceedingly scarce Marion County Metsker plat map atlas, providing invaluable historical and genealogical data for 1920s Salem, Turner, Silverton, Stayton, and as far north as the area around Aurora, Oregon. The index provides specific names and locations for Donation Land Claims, Fruit Farms and Tracts (including logging and sawmill tracts), as well as cities, towns, and suburban additions. Metsker (1881-1966) civil engineer and mapmaker began working as a teenager with his father in a Winlock, WA sawmill by 1900, and later by 1910 ahd become a draftsman in an engineering office in Tacoma, WA, followed during the next 15 years by stints at engineering firms in Seattle, Tacoma, and Portland, before striking out on his own as a mapmaker, surveyor, and mapmaker during the Roaring 20s. Metsker's maps were sold by subscription, and updated on an ongoing basis, so the subscribers were supposed to throw out the earlier versions of the maps, and replace them in the succeeding decades. They all received heavy use, and the earliest versions created in the 1920s and 1930s are by far the scarcest of the atlases produced by the firm. Worldcat locates 3 copies of the 1929 (Multnomah County Library, OHS, State Library of Oregon).