The drafting table in Charles Penobscot Allen's workshop is forty-eight inches by seventy-two, made of birch ply over a steel frame, and was built in 1971 for a different cartographer who worked for a different client list in a different building. Allen bought it at an auction in Augusta in 1994 for one hundred and thirty dollars and has used it almost every working day since.
The workshop is a converted barn behind a one-and-a-half-storey clapboard house on Mere Point Road, three miles east of Brunswick, Maine. It is heated by a small woodstove. The windows face north, which is the orientation cartographers prefer because the light is even and does not shift across a working day. There are four cabinets of map drawers along the south wall, and a shelf of reference works above the drafting table that Allen has built up over forty years.
Allen is sixty-one. He is, by his own reckoning, the last full-time commercial cartographer working in the state of Maine. There are GIS analysts at the Maine Office of Geographic Information Systems, and there are graphic designers who occasionally produce maps for tourist brochures, and there is at least one freelance cartographer in Bangor who works on contract for academic publishers. There is no one else who runs a one-person cartography business as their full income, and who draws by hand as a routine part of the work.
He began as an apprentice in 1984 to a cartographer named Lyford Brewster, whose firm produced topographic maps on commission for landowners, surveyors, and small municipalities. Brewster died in 2001. Allen bought the practice from Brewster's widow for an undisclosed sum and renamed it. The current letterhead reads Penobscot Allen Cartography, in a typeface he chose because Brewster had used something similar.
The clients have not entirely changed since Brewster's day, but the work has. In 1984 a typical month at the firm produced two or three large-format property maps, on Mylar, in ink, for landowners who wanted a record of their boundaries and the features within them. The maps were beautiful in a particular way and were treated as objects by their owners. Many of them now hang framed in the offices of the families that commissioned them.
In 2026 most of Allen's work is digital, or hybrid. He produces vector files in a CAD program for surveyors who need a base map for a subdivision plan. He produces colour-printed quads for small Land Trust organisations who use them in their stewardship materials. About one job in five is still drawn primarily by hand, on Mylar or on cotton-rag paper, and finished with rapidograph pens.
The hand-drawn work is what Allen prefers and what he is best known for. A typical hand-drawn commission, he said one afternoon in late April, takes between four and six weeks of part-time work, runs to a final size of roughly thirty by forty inches, and costs the client between four and nine thousand dollars. He produces eight to ten such maps in a year. Almost all of them are for private landowners.
The current commission, on the drafting table during the visit, is a property map of a 400-acre parcel on the eastern shore of Sebago Lake. The owner is a family that has held the land since the 1890s. The map records the shoreline, the four small streams that feed into the lake from the property, the locations of two old hunting camps, a stone wall that crosses the parcel from the south, and the boundaries of three timber stands of different ages.
Allen has visited the parcel four times. He walked the shoreline with a hand-held GPS to capture the points he needed for the base, and he walked the interior with a printed quad and a clipboard to ground-truth the timber stand boundaries. The hunting camps he located by GPS and confirmed against family records that the client provided. The stone wall he walked on foot, which took most of a day.
Back at the drafting table, the GPS data became a base layer in CAD, which Allen printed at the final scale on Mylar. Over the Mylar he laid a sheet of frosted drafting film, and over that he is now drawing the final map by hand. The contour lines are inked at three weights: heavy for the index contours, medium for the standard, and light for the supplementary. The shoreline is in a single weight, slightly heavier than the contours. The vegetation symbols are stippled by hand in three densities.
He uses Koh-I-Noor rapidograph pens, the technical drawing pens that were standard in the cartography trade from the 1960s into the 1990s. The pens are no longer manufactured in the United States, and the European supply has become unreliable. Allen has accumulated a stock of about forty pens, in seven nib sizes, which he expects will last him until he retires. He buys the ink in twelve-bottle cases from a supplier in Massachusetts.
The lettering is the part of the work that takes the longest and is the hardest to teach. Allen letters by hand in a slightly inclined sans-serif that he developed by imitating Brewster and modifying it over years. He has tried mechanical lettering tools and disliked them. He has tried computer-set type added at the end of the process and disliked that more. Hand lettering on a hand-drawn map, he said, looks right. Anything else, on a hand-drawn map, looks like a graft.
The work is not financially profitable in a strict accounting sense. Allen estimates that hand-drawn commissions, accounting for the time he spends on them at his nominal hourly rate, run roughly at break-even. The digital work subsidises the hand work. He continues the hand work because he likes it, because his clients value it, and because, he said quietly, he is the only person in the state who still does it.
There is no apprentice. Allen has been asked, by three people over the years, whether he would train someone. He has said no each time. The reasons he gave, in conversation, are practical: the income would not support two people, the work has too much idle time for an apprentice to learn efficiently, and the cartographer needs a quiet workshop, not a populated one. The underlying reason, he acknowledged, is that he does not know what he would teach. The methods are his own. They are not a curriculum.
He has thought about a book. A how-to of hand cartography, illustrated with examples from his own work, is the project he says he might begin when he stops taking new commissions. He has not stopped taking new commissions. The book, for now, is a folder of notes in the third drawer of the file cabinet beside the drafting table.
The clients who commission hand-drawn property maps are, by Allen's account, mostly older. The Sebago Lake family is third generation. A coastal property map he completed last autumn was commissioned by a woman in her seventies who wanted a record of her family's island before she sold it. A 1,200-acre tree farm map he finished in 2024 was a sixtieth birthday present from a daughter to her father.
The maps are not, in any of these cases, the cheapest way to document the land. The clients know this. What they are paying for, Allen said, is partly the accuracy, which is real, and partly the artifact, which is also real. A hand-drawn map of a piece of land you love is a different object than a printed satellite image. The difference, he said, is not nostalgia. It is attention.
The barn is quiet. The woodstove is warm. The Sebago Lake map has perhaps a hundred hours of work still to go. Allen turned on a small swing-arm lamp over the drafting table, picked up a 000-nib rapidograph, and began to draw the next short segment of the eastern shoreline, where a small inlet curves north toward a granite outcrop the client had asked him to be sure to include.
