Albert Ruger: Pioneering panoramic map artist

(LoC) Pioneering panoramic map artist Albert Ruger died on November 12, 1899 in Akron, Ohio. Ruger was born in Prussia and emigrated to the United States where he initially worked as a stonemason. While serving with the Ohio Volunteers during the Civil War he began drawing landscapes.
After the war, Ruger settled in Battle Creek, Michigan. In the late 1860s, Ruger joined forces with J.J. Stoner of Madison, Wisconsin to form Merchants Lithographing Company. Over the next three decades, Ruger produced maps of towns and cities in twenty-two states from New Hampshire to Minnesota and as far south as Alabama.
A form of cartography in which towns and cities are drawn as if viewed from above at an oblique angle, panoramic mapping became popular during the late nineteenth century. Panoramic cartographers abandoned restraints of scale to illustrate street patterns, individual buildings, and major landscape features in perspective. Continued