Harold Louis Osher (1924–2023)

Harold Osher, MD (11 January 1924–23 December 2023), who died shortly before his 100th birthday, was a prominent US collector of early maps whose philanthropic strategies have very much influenced and shaped the formation of new map libraries in the United States.¹

Harold Osher with former USM provost, Dr. Jeannine Uzzi, 23 April 2018, examining materials from OML’s newly donated Hamilton-Thayer Collection. Photo: Matthew Edney

Born in Portland, Maine, and raised in the mill town of Biddeford, Osher possessed a rare drive to know and understand the world. He was a precocious student, graduating from the local high school at sixteen, from Bowdoin College (Brunswick, Maine) at nineteen, and from Boston University Medical School at 23. He went on to specialise in cardiology and in 1950–53 was a researcher with the Framingham Longitudinal Study. In 1953 he joined the cardiology division of the Maine Medical Center; as its director for sixteen years, Osher was instrumental in making the hospital a leading centre for cardiology. He spent the 1990s in phased retirement from medicine, the balance of his time being devoted to his second vocation: map collecting and building a new institution for map history in Portland at the University of Southern Maine (USM).

Two factors led to Osher’s commitment to the map library at USM. First, as a cardiologist he worked to interpret a variety of oral and visual diagnostic tools (echocardiograms, electrocardiography, etc.). His passion for early maps was based on the same practice of interpretation, of using early maps to expand his understanding of the past. Second, his family’s profound dedication to philanthropy and his personal love for southern Maine led him and his wife Peggy (née Liberman; 1929–2018) to work hard to improve the region’s quality of life. Peggy Osher was especially involved in fundraising for the reconstruction and expansion of the Portland Museum of Art in 1976–83. When, in 1986, Eleanor Houston Smith agreed to donate to USM the collection of maps and globes that she had assembled together with her late husband, Lawrence M. C. Smith, the Oshers saw an opportunity to make the university into a centre for teaching art, history, literature, and geography through early maps. This was a vision USM faculty and administration would willingly embrace. The result, four decades later, is a true partnership.

To make their vision real would, however, take care, effort, and time. It was not enough for the Oshers just to give their map collection to USM, as Eleanor Smith had done. USM had done right by the Smith collection. A grant from the Maine Humanities Council underwrote the installation in 1988 of a large exhibition at the Portland Museum of Art—‘The Land of Norumbega’—that was curated by Susan Danforth of the John Carter Brown Library; it featured maps not only from the Smith Collection but also from the Oshers and from local libraries and archives, and it was the occasion of an international conference in December 1988.² USM further created the Smith Center for Cartographic Education within the university library, with a curator, Yolanda Theunissen, hired in 1989. Yet the Oshers were well aware that special collection libraries can appear as luxury resources, being relatively expensive to run yet serving comparatively few students and researchers, and that USM was not absolutely committed to keeping the Smith Center open should the university become strapped for cash. Osher therefore consulted with prominent map librarians and scholars and with his close friends and lawyers, Sumner Bernstein (1924–2002) and Rosalyne Bernstein (née Spindel, b. 1928), to design a new Osher Map Library and Smith Center for Cartographic Education (OML) and to ensure that it would remain open.

The Oshers and USM reached an agreement in 1989. The Oshers committed to donating their map collection to USM and to leading the capital campaign to raise funds both for a dedicated facility and for an endowment to cover operational costs. In return, USM agreed to pay for OML’s curatorial and administrative staff from its general funds, including, to begin with, a full-time curator (Theunissen), a rare map cataloguer, and a ‘faculty scholar’. The latter was to be a member of the USM faculty, knowledgeable in map history, and with a significant commitment of effort to the map library. I was hired to the position in 1995. Additionally, USM had to keep OML open. The initial agreement turned Osher’s informal advisors into a formal Board of Review: Ed Dahl (National Archives of Canada); Susan Danforth (JCB); Ron Grim (Library of Congress); Barbara McCorkle (Yale); and David Woodward (University of Wisconsin–Madison).³ The Board was empowered to review USM’s adherence to the operating agreement and had the power, if USM was persistently delinquent, to remove the Osher Collection and its associated endowments and grant them to another institution. A further element in Osher’s strategy was the formation of the Osher Library Associates, a 501(c)3 non-profit charity incorporated in 1990 as a membership organisation to raise further funds to assist OML’s operations. In 2014, the associates began 'doing business as' the Friends of the Osher Map Library. They have been essential in providing seed money for new initiatives and for underwriting material costs, especially for OML’s work in primary (K–12) education.

OML formally opened in 1994. Osher continued to collect early maps, now with the needs of a teaching collection in mind, and the library attracted several other map collections. Osher also continued to donate funds to both the university (as in 2006 to endow the Osher Chair in the History of Cartography) and to the Associates. As OML grew rapidly it was apparent that it needed larger facilities, complete with a new digital imaging suite. Osher led a second capital campaign with the University to build a new wing to the university library. His strategy, as he admitted once the legal and financial framework had been established, was simple: ‘if you build it, they have to staff it’. This strategy proved effective. USM has steadily increased staffing for OML since the expanded facility reopened in 2009, in line with the staff’s extensive accomplishments. The utility of a carrot-and-stick agreement became apparent when the financial crisis of 2014–15 threatened public higher education in Maine and OML. The agreement held, however, and OML remained open. Osher reached a new agreement with USM in 2018, with a commitment to a greatly enlarged endowment for OML to be managed by a private foundation, combined with a further review program and a reconfigured and enlarged institutional structure. Under its first executive director, Prof. Libby Bischof, OML has just passed the major review checkpoint with flying colours.

The Oshers’ decision to work with USM not only to create but also to develop and grow the Osher Map Library and Smith Center for Cartographic Education has had far reaching consequences. Many collectors have given their carefully curated collections, books, and maps to existing libraries, both big and small, and many philanthropists have given large sums to help fund such libraries. But very few people have done both. The Oshers’ public-private model for creating a dedicated and well-designed library has directly influenced the formation of the Norman B. Leventhal Map and Education Center at Boston Public Library (founded 2004), the David Rumsey Map Center at Stanford University (2016), and the Touchton Map Library at the Tampa Bay History Center (2017). The model has also shaped the establishment of the Kislak centres within the special collections of the universities of Miami and Pennsylvania. Among his many other accomplishments, Harold Osher is to be remembered and celebrated for significantly changing the institutional structure of map history in the United States.

Notes

1 On Osher as a map collector, see Tony Campbell’s commendation in Journal of the International Map Collectors’ Society [IMCoS] 130 (Autumn 2012): 49–51, on the occasion of Osher’s receipt of the IMCoS-Helen Wallis Award; and Harold L. Osher, ‘Afield with Old Maps,’ in Doctors Afield, ed. Mary G. McCrea Curnan, Howard Spiro, and Deborah St. James (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), 196–204.

2 Susan L. Danforth, The Land of Norumbega: Maine in the Age of Exploration and Settlement (Portland: Maine Humanities Council, 1988). The conference proceedings, augmented with further essays, was published as American Beginnings: Exploration, Culture, and Cartography in the Land of Norumbega, ed. Emerson W. Baker, Edwin A. Churchill, Richard D’Abate, Kristine L. Jones, Victor A. Konrad, and Harald E. L. Prins (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994).

3 The Board’s composition has of course changed over time. It currently comprises: James Akerman (Newberry Library, retired); Ron Grim (Boston Public Library, retired); Ben Huseman (University of Texas at Arlington); Anne Knowles (University of Maine); Mary Pedley (University of Michigan, retired); and Bill Rankin (Yale University).