An Oregon service station owner loved old maps and Northwest history so much, he launched a family business that’s still going strong more than 50 years later.
Preston’s old atlases remain a valuable and distinctive resource because each volume features an assortment of public domain vintage maps originally published by governments, railroads, and other entities from the mid-19th century to the mid-20th century. Users can flip through the pages of different maps from different eras and readily see and compare the changes over the decades – and perhaps even find, as language on the front covers tease, “Overland Stage Routes . . . Old Military Roads . .
And that time goes back nearly a century, to when Preston was born of modest means on a farm just outside of Lebanon, Ore. in February 1926. His father died when Ralph was just a boy, so pretty soon, Ralph had to quit school and get a job. After serving in the Navy in World War II and then working for a time as a logger, Preston got into the service station business in his hometown. By the 1960s, with help from his wife, he was running his own service station in Corvallis, Ore. And it was there – sometime in the late 1960s – when an old map changed the course of his life.
It wasn’t long before that single 1878 map expanded in the first Historical Oregon atlas, with other states following in short order.