Metsker’s atlas of Crook County Oregon.

Portland, OR & Tacoma, WA: Metsker the Map Man, 514 SW Oak St., 1943. Thick oblong atlas folio. 18 x 14.5 in. 87 cyanotype blueprint leaves. Including 86 detailed blueprint plat maps, consistently dated 1943, key map title page. Publisher’s flexible simulated calf post-binder, gilt lettering title stamped on front cover, burgundy-coloured silk more pastedowns (slight tidemark at foot of gutter margin, minor toning, edgewear to a few maps), still a VG copy, from the estate of Edward Gray (1941-1996), best known for his excellent and detailed Oregon histories, such as Life and Death of Oregon “Cattle King” Peter French (1849-1897), An Illustrated History of Early Northern Klamath County Oregon, and William “Bill” W. Brown, 1855-1941: Legend of Oregon’s high desert. Second edition of this very rare Crook County Metsker plat map atlas, and this Eastern Oregon county atlases compiled at the scale of 2 in. = 1 mile an updated edition issued five years after the first. This atlas provides invaluable historical and genealogical data for Eastern Oregon at the height of World War II, as logging operations in the Ochoco National Forest in and around Prineville to meet accelerated demand for the War effort. The index provides specific names and locations for Donation Land Claims, logging and sawmill tracts, logging operations, Prineville, and other towns, schools, and even Quicksilver Mine. 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 are by far the scarcest of the atlases produced by the firm. No copies in Worldcat, 2 copies located of the 1938 (Multnomah County Lib., State Lib. of Oregon).