Description
Charles Shober was the leading Chicago lithographer of his day. Born in Germany, he emigrated to the U.S. in 1854 and was working as a lithographer by 1855, beginning in Philadelphia. In 1859 he relocated to Chicago and opened his own firm. After the great fire of 1871, he took over management of Chicago Lithographing Company with Louis Kurtz and Edward Carqueville. In 1876, Kurtz left, and Shober & Carqueville was established, publishing sheet music, posters, maps and trade cards. Shober left that company in the early 1880s and later became president of the Chicago Bank Note Company. He was listed in censuses as of 1900.
Rufus Blanchard (1821-1904) was a mapmaker and writer of histories. He was born in New England and began his career as a wilderness hunter and trapper in Ohio. He then worked in New York, as a salesman for the Harper Brothers publishing house, and operated bookstores in Lowell, Massachusetts; Cincinnati; and New Orleans. Returning to New York in 1849, he began publishing maps using the cerography wax engraving process with C. Morse, son of the inventor Samuel Morse. Blanchard moved to the Chicago area in 1854 and continued in the map business, eventually moving to Wheaton, Illinois in the 1860s. There he published numerous pocket maps and guidebooks of Chicago and of Midwestern states. In 1867 he joined with his nephew George F. Cram to make maps from U.S. Army Corps of Engineers surveys. Blanchard became interested in the stories behind the places in the maps, and published histories of Cook and DuPage Counties, the City of Chicago and the Northwest Territory. He lost many of his business assets in a major fire in the Wheaton business district in 1871, and the rest in a second fire in 1885. After Blanchard’s death in 1904, Cram managed his estate and continued to publish maps under Blanchard’s imprint until about 1917.
Full publication information: Published by Rufus Blanchard Under the Auspices of the Chicago Historical Society. Entered according to Act of Congress in the Year 1867, by R. Blanchard in the Clerks Office of the District Court of the United States for the Northern District of Illinois. Lith. by Chas. Shober & Co. Chicago.
References:
“Blanchard’s Map of Chicago with the New Street Names (1906).” David Rumsey Map Collection. 2010. http://www.davidrumsey.com/luna/servlet/detail/RUMSEY~8~1~34147~1170881:Blanchard-s-map-of-Chicago-with-the (31 January 2014).
“Shober, Charles.” Library Company of Philadelphia. 2017. https://digital.librarycompany.org/islandora/object/digitool%3A79765 (22 April 2019).
“Wolf Point, Chicago.” Wikipedia. 31 August 2018. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolf_Point,_Chicago (22 April 2019).
“Wolf’s Point in 1833.” Library of Congress. http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2003677757/ (22 April 2019).
“Wolf’s Point in 1833.” New York Public Library. http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/aa0b84b0-c5ed-012f-b148-58d385a7bc34 (22 April 2019).
