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Great vintage map of Washington State, designed by the renowned West Coast artist Fred Routledge, who specialized in this type of pictorial mapping. This map advertises the city of Longview, which was designed by George Kessler and incorporated the year after this map was published, in 1924.
Located at the final major bend of the Columbia River, Longview is here shown planned in a Roman style, following Washington D.C. The rest of the state of Washington is attractively portrayed, with Mt. Rainier, Mt. St. Helens, Seattle, Tacoma, and many other parts of the state visible, as well as Portland in Oregon.
Routledge was perhaps the best mapmaker in Oregon history; his work exemplifies the stylized realism of the first decades of the 20th century. This style matched modern mapmaking techniques with the budding pictorial mapping tradition and incorporated the revelations provided by commercial air travel and photography.
Fred Routledge (1871-1936) was an Oregon artist and pictorial mapmaker, who spent much of his professional life as a correspondent for the Morning Oregonian. His career lasted from the 1890s to the early 1930s. Routledge was a well regarded artist, who received awards for his paintings, including a first prize at the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition in San Francisco. His ephemeral work as a pictorial cartographer was also very well regarded.
Routledge was born in Abilene, Kansas, raised in Rockford, Illinois, and settled in the Portland area in 1886 with his family. He began working as an illustrator with the West Shore publication before its demise in 1891, thereafter finding wor at the Oregonian in 1895. The January 1, 1896 "Where Rolls the Oregon," is his first work of significant note.
