Pivotal Los Angeles mapmaker and copyright advocate
During the early part of the 20th century, Laura L. Whitlock was known as “the official mapmaker of Los Angeles County.” She was not only the first female cartographer in the United States to publish her work for mass audiences, she was also the first person in the country to win a federal copyright lawsuit, thereby establishing protections for future mapmakers.
Laura was born in Iowa but migrated west with her mother, first to Nebraska and later to Los Angeles in 1895. She initially taught music at 6th and Hill, but by 1901, she took a job with a florist who shared quarters with a tourist information bureau.
In 1907, she was selected president of the Pacific Coast Travel Club and began her career making and selling maps.
While working out of her office in the Los Angeles Times building, she studied railroad and engineering maps extensively, including those from Pacific Electric Railway, Los Angeles Railway and Los Angeles Motor Coach Company. Eventually, she put together six plates of an official map of the city.
In this era, her maps reveal not just pre-freeway Los Angeles, or long gone neighborhood names like “Tropico”, but also her own love of the city’s extensive transit system. Unfortunately on October 1, 1910, all of the originals were destroyed in the infamous Los Angeles Times building bombing, forcing her to rebuild from scratch, while defending against pirated copies of her maps.
More on Whitlock and her cartographic career can be found in this 2019 online exhibit from the Huntington Library; this 2014 article from Los Angeles Magazine; and Glen Creason’s, former map librarian at Los Angeles Public Library and co-curated the landmark 2008-2009 exhibition L.A Unfolded: Maps from the Los Angeles Public Library, 2010 book, Los Angeles in Maps (2010).
Now, Whitlock’s highly detailed and prized maps are held by museums, the Library of Congress, and our own Metro Transportation Research Library & Archive. Metro is fortunate enough to have one of her final maps in our collection: a large 1927 transit map, gifted to our predecessor, the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission (1977-1993) by the City of Los Angeles at the opening of the A (Blue) Line in 1990.
We also maintain an online collection of maps, available here, as well as a full-text inventory of Los Angeles Transit And Transportation Studies, 1911-1957. These documents include rare maps and other illustrative material from L.A.’s transit and transportation history.