Rare Civil War Atlas Being Scanned for Internet Access

Carl Sandburg Home National Historic Site is not the site of a civil war battle, the home of civil war general, or the location of a treaty signing. It was the home of writer Carl Sandburg from 1945 until his death in 1967. Along with his poetry, fiction, children’s stories and music, Carl Sandburg was an important biographer of Abraham Lincoln.

Over the many years that Sandburg worked on Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years (2 volumes published in 1926) and Abraham Lincoln: The War Years, (4 volumes published in 1939) he amassed an impressive collection of documentation of the times in which Lincoln lived. What might surprise many is that Mr. Sandburg owned a nearly complete set of the rare Atlas to Accompany the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies. The Official Records themselves were published in 128 volumes by the War Records Office and subsequently by the Record and Pension Office. The Atlas was published between 1891 and 1895 and is the definitive source of Civil War information available. It consists of 178 plates, portraying a variety of information, from maps of individual battle sites to photographic views and uniforms and weaponry. There are also many broader-scale maps of regions, states, and the division of the country at various points during the war. The 178 plates contain a staggering 1,006 maps, plans and illustrations.

To document this important resource and make it available for research without handling the large delicate plates, the park decided to have the entire collection scanned. Project funding was requested and received. A contract for $5,000 was awarded, with the assistance of Great Smoky Mountains National Park, to Backstage Library Works, Inc. in Orem, Utah. The contractor will provide the park with CDs containing a TIFF file of each plate as well as a derivative JPEG file. The JPEG files will accompany the detailed museum catalog records in the NPS web catalog available on-line.

Caption for photograph: Park Museum Technician, Sam Sematis, carefully moves an atlas plate from storage to the scanning table where the contractor, Sara Cluff, operates the computer to capture the image.