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There’s a similarly indispensable guide to the Upper Valley, one that people who were here in the pre-GPS era will know well. When I moved to the area in 1993, people I worked with told me that if I wanted to know how to get around, I needed a Vermont Atlas and Gazetteer, and many of them would pull their battered copies from behind the seat of a truck to show me what to look for.
Since then, I’ve had several copies of the large-format book of maps, for both Vermont and New Hampshire. They are not only indispensable, but are fascinating reading, full of oddities that would escape notice on a digital map, if they even showed up there.
For example, the atlases are dotted with village names, and not just the East Thetfords and Cornish Flats we all know about, or should. Some of them seem obsolete. There’s a Russtown on Route 5, south of White River Junction; Hardscrabble, north of Lyme Center; or, in the southeast corner of Bath, N.H., a crossroads labeled Nutter.
Nutter! Was it named for an eccentric, long-ago resident who believed himself the king of England, and who defended himself to his neighbors by saying “I’m not a nutter,” thereby condemning himself and his neighborhood? If it was named after a prolific stand of butternut trees, I don’t want to know. Even real maps with real villages and roads on them can be notional.
More importantly, the atlases show where maintained dirt roads end, giving way to jeep trails or footpaths. Raise your hand if you’ve heard a horror story about someone following a GPS device’s directions into an impassable swamp. (Or bury your head in your hands if such a thing has happened to you.)
The shorthand for these maps is often “the gazetteer,” but I bet most people use them as road atlases first. What is a gazetteer, exactly? I had to look it up: “A dictionary or index of geographical names.”
It’s fair to wonder whether these atlases can survive into the digital era. There have been some ominous signs.
DeLorme, the Yarmouth, Maine, company that makes the maps, was sold last year to Garmin, a Kansas-based company (incorporated in Switzerland since 2010) that makes GPS devices. If the atlases seem tailor-made for northern New England, that’s because they are. Frustrated at not being able to find maps to his favorite Maine fishing spots, David DeLorme founded the company in 1976, starting with the Maine Atlas and Gazetteer, according to a story in the Portland Press-Herald about the company’s deal with Garmin.
The company closed the map store in its headquarters at the end of February 2016, a few weeks after the company was sold, the Press-Herald reported; a company official said map sales have tailed off, but are now holding fairly steady. The atlases are still available for people who want a guide to the back roads, brooks, ponds and oddly named crossroads in their state, or any of the 50 states. On Sunday, I found the Massachusetts and Connecticut/Rhode Island atlases at an archery store in Barre, Vt., half-off, and snapped them up.
I suspect the atlases will endure. The pleasure of looking at these maps, whether at the wheel in a diner parking lot, or with the book open on a lap or a table while planning a camping trip, makes them truly indispensable.
Alex Hanson can be reached at ahanson@vnews.com or 603-727-3207.
Correction
Garmin Ltd., is an American technology company with headquarters in Olathe, Kan. Since 2010, it has been incorporated in Switzerland. An earlier version of this story was unclear about the company’s location.
