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November 27, 2006

The world as it was | Charles Carpenter is assembling a Web-based business from his collection of historic maps

By Whit Richardson

Charles Carpenter has been collecting rare books for 30 years, specializing in scientific tomes you won't find in an average used bookstore. His collection includes a copy of Aristotle's works published in Venice in 1476. "Oh jeez, I've got Kepler, Copernicus, Galileo. I've got all the scientific writers," Carpenter says.

His affinity for historic texts is seen in another of his collections: 19th and early 20th century cadastral maps, which depict property lines, structural footprints and the names of property owners. But this collection is more than just a hobby; he sees a business opportunity. "My goal from the beginning was to have the first [geographic information system]-linked digital map of North America going back 200 years," says Carpenter, a research fellow at Idexx Laboratories in Westbrook.

Carpenter calls his business Historic Map Works, and his plan is simple: scan and upload roughly 100,000 historic maps of the United States and Ontario to a website on which people can look for an historic home or the names of previous property owners. He calls it the Google Earth of historic maps.

Carpenter launched his first website in late 2005, and until now has not charged users to browse his maps. But come January, the site will become a subscription-based service with an annual rate of $29.99. Over the next six months, he'll add features that let subscribers plug in their address and find its location on historic maps. Subscribers also will be able to upload historic pictures of homes or family members and attach them to maps, making the site a genealogical research tool.

The project's genesis came 14 years ago, when Carpenter ran across a cadastral map of Scarborough from 1871 while browsing a used bookstore in southern Maine. On it, he located his 230-year-old home along with its former owner's name: Captain William Moses. "I thought it was so neat I bought it and put it on my wall," he says.

Ten years later, while browsing a used bookstore in New Hampshire, he found an atlas published in 1891 filled with cadastral maps of all of that state's towns. That's when the idea for a business hit him, and he began to buy every historical atlas he could lay his hands on.

He spent roughly $1 million to buy nearly 2,000 of these atlases, containing 100,000 maps, along with another $225,000 to buy the computers and scanners needed to digitize them. Since then, he's moved the operation from a barn at his home to a 4,800-square-foot space in Westbrook where he now has 15 employees.

By marrying genealogy with digital mapping, Carpenter figures he has a pretty solid business plan, albeit a capital intensive one. He says it will probably cost another $2.5 million in labor costs and map purchases to build out the business. Yet once that database is complete, Carpenter expects it to be worth millions to big digital mapping companies like Google or Microsoft.

He isn't worried about discussing details of his business plan, because he says it's next to impossible for someone to replicate his efforts. Only the Library of Congress has a larger collection of rare cadastral maps, according to Carpenter. Not that he plans to hang onto it, however.

When he's finished scanning all the maps — which he says won't be for another two years — he plans to donate the collection to the Osher Map Library at the University of Southern Maine. "[Maps] are probably the only world-class collection of anything [at USM]," Carpenter says, "and this will add greatly to their collection."

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