Fielding Lucas, Jr.

Fielding Lucas, Jr.: The Man Who Put Baltimore on the Map

In 1804 a twenty-three-year-old Virginian opened a shop at 116 East Baltimore Street selling paper, ink and books. It was among the first true stationers in the United States. Within a decade he had moved into the map trade, and within two he was producing what contemporaries considered the finest general atlas made in America. Fielding Lucas, Jr. spent fifty years turning a stationery counter into the publishing house that gave Baltimore a place in the history of American cartography — and, along the way, gave the American Catholic Church its first serious reference annual and Baltimore its first guidebook.

From Fredericksburg to Baltimore Street

Lucas was born on 3 September 1781 in Fredericksburg, Virginia, into a family apparently settled there since at least the middle of the century. Almost nothing is known of his childhood or education, which is itself telling: he arrives in the record already in business, with no inherited firm and no obvious patron. In 1804 he founded the concern that became Lucas Brothers at its East Baltimore Street address, and in 1806 he took on the management of the Baltimore operations of the Philadelphia house of Conrad, Lucas and Company. He worked alongside the firm of Mathew Carey, the Irish-born Philadelphian who was then the most important publisher in the United States.

That apprenticeship inside the Philadelphia trade matters. Carey's house was where American publishing learned to do things at scale, and Lucas took what he learned back down the road to a city that had no equivalent.

Into the Map Trade

He entered map publishing around 1814, when he issued an atlas of the United States. He is generally recognised as the earliest successful commercial map publisher in Baltimore, which in the early republic was a genuinely open field: American atlas production was concentrated in Philadelphia and New York, and mapping the young country was a business that required capital, engraving talent and an appetite for risk in roughly equal measure.

His first atlas came out between 1815 and 1817, and it is closely bound up with the well-known Philadelphia edition issued by Carey & Lea in 1822. *A New and Elegant General Atlas* is dated to 1814. But the work that made his reputation was *A General Atlas Containing Distinct Maps* of 1823, described as the finest general atlas produced in the United States at the time. A world atlas followed in 1825, alongside a stream of smaller atlases and separately issued maps, including a nautical chart of the Chesapeake and Delaware bays.

He did not engrave. Much of his output was cut by Henry Schenck Tanner, the outstanding American engraver of the period, and Lucas collaborated with the architect and engineer Robert Mills on the *Atlas of South Carolina*, one of the earliest state atlases produced in America.

The Catholic Almanac

Lucas's second great line of business began in 1834 with *The Metropolitan Catholic Calendar and Laity's Directory*, renamed in 1838 the *Metropolitan Catholic Almanac*. Baltimore was the primatial see of American Catholicism, and Lucas built the almanac into the church's principal reference work in the United States: the 1845 edition added a map of the American dioceses — a natural move for a mapmaker — and by 1850 it carried clergy lists for England and Ireland as well. Together with his contemporary John Murphy, Lucas made Baltimore a centre of Catholic publishing in America.

Drawing Books, Flowers and a City

The rest of the list shows a publisher with unusually broad instincts. *Lucas' Progressive Drawing Book*, issued in three parts from 1827, was an early American art-instruction manual. He helped publish *Flora's Dictionary*, one of the first colour-plate books produced in the United States — technically demanding and expensive work. And in 1832 he wrote *Picture of Baltimore*, a guide to the city he had adopted.

The Civic Man

Lucas became a figure of consequence in Baltimore quite apart from his trade. He was a patron of the arts and a philanthropist; he sat on the committee that built the city's Washington Monument, the first substantial monument to Washington anywhere in the country; he founded the Maryland Institute for the Promotion of the Mechanic Arts; and from 1827 he served as a director of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, the first common-carrier railroad in the United States, in the very year of its chartering.

That last appointment is a useful measure of his standing. The B&O board was where Baltimore's commercial establishment sat, and a stationer-turned-publisher was on it from the beginning.

Why Fielding Is Called a Genius

Lucas surveyed nothing and engraved nothing. He was a publisher, and the case for the word — if it is to be made honestly — rests on judgement and taste rather than on discovery. Three things support it.

The first is compositional judgement. An atlas is not a collection of maps; it is an argument about what a reader needs to understand the world, in what order and at what scale. The 1823 atlas was held to be the best in America because Lucas made better choices than his competitors about projection, colour, typography and inclusion — and those are aesthetic and editorial decisions, made by him.

The second is market-making. Baltimore had no map trade before him. Building one there, in direct competition with Philadelphia and New York houses with deeper capital and better engravers, required him to be right about a market that did not yet exist. He was, repeatedly, across atlases, drawing manuals, colour-plate books and the Catholic almanac — four different audiences, all correctly read.

The third is his eye for collaborators: Tanner for engraving, Mills for South Carolina.

The counter-case is straightforward and should be conceded. The geographic content of Lucas's maps was compiled from existing surveys, much of it not his own; the finest engraving in his atlases is Tanner's hand; his most durable publication, the Catholic almanac, succeeded partly because Baltimore's ecclesiastical primacy handed him a captive readership. He was a superb impresario of other people's skills, working in a genre where the impresario's judgement is the product. Call it commercial and editorial genius, decline to call it invention, and the description is accurate.

Legacy

Lucas died in Baltimore on 12 March 1854, aged seventy-two. The business passed on and was acquired by his son William F. Lucas in 1866. His atlases are now collectors' objects, sold by the map dealers of Chicago and San Diego at prices that would have astonished the man who set them at a stationer's counter, and the *Atlas of South Carolina* and the great 1823 general atlas remain reference points for the history of American mapmaking. Baltimore's Washington Monument still stands on the hill he helped put it on.

Achievements

• Recorded as cartographer and publisher