Jasper County citizen to digitize a historic drainage district map

With a huge grin across his face and an old tattered map tucked underneath his arm, Joe Otto was one peg leg and an eye patch away from looking like he was ready to search for buried treasure somewhere in the Seven Seas. For him though the true treasure was the map, but it didn’t lead to a chest of riches.

Instead, it was an old drainage district map of Jasper County. Otto requested the board of supervisors lend him the document so that he may digitize it and then turn over the digital file to the county. Afterwards he will give the map back and that will be the end of it. He didn’t even ask for a fee. Well, not this time at least.

“It’s kind of like at what point does something become historically valuable? This is the map of the Skunk River before it was channelized, so it’s the very last image of what it looked like before it was channelized,” Otto, of Colfax, said. “…I’ve never seen it unrolled but I think it’s like 10 feet long. It’s pretty big.”

Supervisor Brandon Talsma pointed to the rolled up map sitting across from Otto in the board room. Talsma remarked that it was a “pretty cool map,” and he marveled at its hand-drawn etchings. He said the engineer’s office might have unrolled the map at the least once in recent years.

Otto heard stories from the museum that the drainage district maps used to hang on the walls of the courthouse 40 or 50 years ago. At the time, the channeling of the Skunk River was the biggest infrastructure project Jasper County had ever seen. Otto estimated the channeling was conducted in the 1910s.

So what made Otto want to seek out these old drainage district maps? Well, in addition to his interests as a historian, he was curious after speaking with a man in Reasnor who is doing some work on oxbow restoration with the Iowa Department of Agriculture and Land Stewardship.

What did it used to look like? Where can I find that out? These were questions the man asked Otto, and he knew just where to look — so long as it still existed.

Otto contacted the auditor’s office and found out, yes, the drainage maps do exist.

“It doesn’t take me much to take it to Des Moines and find a digitization company with a scanner to do it,” Otto said. “I would do it all for free. I mean if this is something you’re wanting, like if you see value in this down the line for other things, maybe we can talk about money down the road for other things.”

For now, Otto thinks it is “just a cool map” that should be preserved.

“Right now I’m just an interested citizen,” he said.

Supervisors had no problem with Otto borrowing the district map, which has by and large outlived its original purpose but more so now exists as a historic record. At the meeting, Otto took a quick peek of the map. He was surprised it wasn’t made with blueprint paper, which is considerably more delicate.

“It’s definitely more than paper,” Otto said, feeling the edges of the map. “There’s like threads in it and stuff … But basically the engineer at the time was named Willard Byers. I think he was from Monroe. He just walked the river in the winter time. He had his notes, went back to his drafting table and drew the map.”

Otto realized it was the first he had ever been able to see the map in person.

“This is kind of a treat for me!” he said. “…At the end of the day, it’s an old map, it’s got an interesting image on it.”