Landmarks: A 200-year archive of maps faces uncertain future

A group of college students in Springfield was engaged in an ambitious project to digitize all the written records associated with court cases argued by Abraham Lincoln back when he was just an Illinois attorney.

One name the students found that appeared in a couple of cases associated with Lincoln was Samuel S. Greeley, a prominent surveyor based in Chicago in the city’s early days.

“They Googled him and found us,” said Tanya Smith, whose husband, Donald Smith, took over his family’s surveying business in the 1970s. Around the time of that transfer, Smith’s father had mentioned some cabinets in the business’s off-site archives that were no longer used.

The Springfield effort, associated with the brand-new Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum, was trying to track down court records that survived the Great Chicago Fire. That search took them to the Smiths, then living in Flossmoor.

“Don said I’ll look and let you know,” Tanya Smith said. “We went through those old cabinets and found a stack of drawings wrapped in paper and fabric in an old coach trunk. Now it’s a famous trunk.”

The materials were map exhibits Greeley prepared for two cases argued by Lincoln related to property ownership of sandbars in Lake Michigan that formed after large piers were created. They eventually made it to the U.S. Supreme Court and resulted in landmark decisions.

How the materials survived the 1871 destruction of nearly the entire city of Chicago is subject to some speculation, Smith said, but the journey of that coach trunk over century and a half can be chalked up to a maxim of her husband’s line of work.

“The liability of surveyors is long,” Tanya Smith said.

Donald Smith, now in his 70s, took over Greeley, Howard, Norlin & Smith Surveyors from his father, who had taken the reins from his wife’s uncle, a surveyor whose father was a surveyor and whose grandfather was Samuel Greeley, one of five surveyors operating in Chicago in the decades before the Great Chicago Fire.

Each time the business changed hands, a growing archive of maps, plats, drawings and other drafted material came with it. They never knew when they’d have to dive back in to consult notes or drawings associated with a plat or survey, even if that work had been done a century previously.

They came in handy when, like his predecessor five generations earlier, Donald Smith was called as an expert witness in a property dispute case.

“A multimillion dollar corporation versus a multibillion dollar corporation — a boundary dispute over 3 feet of land on the South Side of Chicago,” Tanya Smith said. “Don brought the original field notes from 1872.”

They helped verify the smaller company’s claim.

Now semiretired and living in northwest Indiana, the Smiths are devoting more and more time to managing those archives, which they’ve moved to a warehouse closer to their home. Though Samuel Greeley first registered his surveying business in 1854, their oldest documents go back to the earliest days of Illinois statehood.

Greeley, a Harvard man, was brought to Chicago and initially employed by famous engineer and sewer system designer Ellis Chesbrough, and likely hobnobbed regularly with the city’s elite. At some point after the Great Chicago Fire he moved to Winnetka where a school was subsequently named for him.

“When my husband took over the business after his father died in 1975, he didn’t really know what was in all those cabinets and old boxes,” Tanya Smith said. “When we started digging, every week we found something that we unfolded or opened, our eyes widened.”

The oldest document they’ve found so far is dates back to 1818, a drawing of the city environs showing part of Lake Michigan, the mouth of the Chicago River, Fort Dearborn and a few houses outside of the fort in a scene from 19 years before Chicago was incorporated.

That drawing, likely generated by the Army Corps of Engineers as there were no surveyors in the area, and other early state maps and documents were “obtained by our predecessors for different projects,” Tanya Smith said. That includes the three generations of Greeleys as well as independent surveyors Howard, who merged his firm with Greeley in 1880, and Norland, who joined in 1913. There’s also material from surveyors who joined the firm over the years without getting onto the company masthead.

“When the economy is good, everyone wants to be on their own,” Tanya Smith said. “When the economy isn’t good, people start looking for jobs with larger companies. It’s always like that, at least in this business.

“I don’t know how they all joined, but we have a huge archive, and it’s not necessarily all under Greeley’s name. We see drawings signed by different people and we have no clue who they were.”

That economic concept hit home for the Smiths in 2008 amid the Great Recession when the real estate market crashed, “effectively killing our business.”

“The guys were still doing a few projects, but I had too much free time,” she said, so she started looking into the history of the family business and her husband’s predecessors.

When the economy recovered, the Smiths, now in their 60s, closed their Orland Park office and moved from Flossmoor to Chesterton, Indiana, and focused more time on exploring their massive archive.

“We stopped advertising, though we still do surveys for clients we’ve known for decades,” she said.

At the outset of the pandemic a few years later they began organizing and digitizing the materials in earnest.

“First I started looking in the cabinets for cute stuff,” Tanya Smith said, scanning the more intricate drawings and notable maps. But she realized she couldn’t put drawers back until everything in them was scanned, otherwise they would lose track of what they’d finished with. “Drawers were lying on every available surface.”

They’ve since enlisted two helpers and are systematically scanning the entire archive, digitizing 1,500 to 2,000 documents each week, she said.

“Looking at what we’ve done so far and what else there is to be scanned, we’ve only done a small portion,” she said, estimating the archive contains upward of 400,000 or 500,000 documents.

They’ve also developed a speaking presentation they give to interested groups, outlining the history of their business and showing highlights from their map collection.

Donald Smith wouldn’t describe the materials that way, though.

“I don’t consider our archive as a ‘collection,’” he said. “It is an ongoing accumulation of important documents and maps.

“I am very proud of my ancestors and family, as well as myself for the ongoing work of saving these historical items.”

The items include artifacts important to national history, including survey work done by the firm for the development of a resort north of Grand Rapids, Michigan, around Lake Idlewild in the early 20th century that became known as “Black Eden,” as it catered to vacationing African Americans at a time when segregation and racism limited peoples’ destination choices.

The presentations are a way to showcase the Smiths’ pride in their company, as well as a way to impart the importance of the trade. They also hope to secure a future for the materials accumulated over the last 170 years.

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Like with the Greeley descendants after its third generation, the Smiths’ children aren’t interested in carrying on the family business. But this time, there’s no surveyor nephew ready to assume the mantle, and Greeley, Howard, Norlin & Smith has no successor in line.

“We hope to find a good new home for our archive,” Donald Smith said, noting he hopes a public institution such as library, museum or university will “finish scanning our archive and make it available to the scholars and the public for various research and education for generations to come.”

Tanya Smith said several smaller historical societies have reached out indicating they would “take everything you can find about our town,” but the Smiths are reluctant to split the collection up if they can help it.

Even though she’s a relatively recent addition to the long line of surveyors, marrying into the family about 30 years ago after moving her from her native Ukraine, she’s passionate about the archive and the history it represents.

“Maybe I have this drive because I grew up in a part of the world where records almost don’t exist,” she said. “There have been so many wars and conflicts there. When the communists came in 1917, they closed all the churches and burned some of them, burned the registry books in the places where people registered their births and marriages. Then the First World War and then the Second World War.

“My relatives were trying to do ancestry research and they can’t find anything. The U.S. is, relatively, a new, young country. These records do exist, and I would really like to save them.”

Landmarks is a weekly column by Paul Eisenberg exploring the people, places and things that have left an indelible mark on the Southland. He can be reached at peisenberg@tribpub.com.