The Mysterious Case of Ernest G. Lemcke

Posted on January 16, 2020 Updated on January 15, 2020

By Lauren Maddox

Sometimes I like to pull back the curtain a bit for you– show you some of the behind-the-scenes work that goes on unseen at the AGSL. I was given a special project a few months ago that I thought the readers of this blog would be interested in hearing about.

Some things about me you need to know: I love puzzles and I have never seen Mission Impossible. Most of the AGSL staff loves puzzles; we are currently working on a 4,000 piece puzzle (which you can see if you visit us!). Generally, my work at the AGSL has me at a desk writing– that’s my job. But sometimes someone gives me something different to work on.

Susan Peschel stopped by my desk with a nondescript beige box.

“Your mission, should you choose to accept it–” she stopped to ask me if I remembered Mission Impossible. I didn’t, but I had at least heard the quote before. Susan told me that she had a puzzle for me (and that it might explode once she walked away).

The problem with the box, which had traveled with the AGSL’s collection from New York to Milwaukee in the 70s, was that it had never been archived. The papers in the box were unsorted– no one even knew what they were. By all appearances, the collection of handwritten pages and letters seemed random. There were maps in the pile, but they were either hand-drawn or, stranger, road maps that had been drawn over. My mission (and I did accept it) was to figure out what we had and then to put it into some semblance of order.

We didn’t know much, but we did know his name: Ernest G. Lemcke. We knew he was a card-carrying member of the American Geographical Society of New York because we have a record of his membership dues:

He wrote a trove of letters to Ena L. Yonge and John K. Wright. He bought a roadmap in 1926 and hand-drew a medieval military event in England from the 1300s. He was a book publisher in New York– which I discovered because some of his stationery had letterhead from Lemcke&Buechner, “Booksellers, publishers, importers.”

Part of the trouble with deciphering the box was figuring out what was meant for who. The maps were easy– Ena L. Yonge was map curator for the AGS of New York at the time, and his maps often came with a letter explaining what they were. But the partial manuscripts, many handwritten first drafts, and article corrections for the AGS’s periodical were mysterious and dense.

After many fruitless Google searches, I learned a few things about Lemcke: besides being a book publisher, he was also a historian with several books out, many specifically interested in the “Tribal Hidage” in Wessex. As it turns out, the University of New Hampshire also has a collection of Lemcke papers! Which was how I tracked down some of his publications and discovered that the many handwritten pages about a “tribal hidage” and the first English Census were partial drafts of his later, completed publications.

Now that I had a better idea of what we had, I came to the next part of the puzzle: putting it in order. I started with separating the things that were obviously addressed to Yonge or Wright. Maps were obviously meant for Yonge, and corresponded with letters that he had sent. John K. Wright was once director of the AGS of New York, but that didn’t help place many of Lemcke’s letters. But as it turned out, before he was director, Wright was the editor of the AGS’s regular publication from 1920-1956. This was exactly the period of time Lemcke was writing. The periodical corrections, then, seemed to be for the editor of the publication. And after reading Lemcke’s letters, I found him explaining corrections to his manuscript to Wright.

Once the letters were sorted by recipient, I started to put them in a chronological order. Some of the letters were dated– those were easy. But many of the letters weren’t dated. For several of them, I found a reference he made to an article he had just read, which helped me place it in the chronology. But many more had to be dated by their relationship to the other letters, which made for some puzzling work.

After finishing the work of putting the box in order, it was time to have it officially archived. This was definitely out of my expertise, so I reached out to fellow graduate intern Georgia Brown, who consulted our curator, Marcy Bidney, about what to do with the box.

Soon, the Lemcke papers will be officially archived! Since all of his correspondence was addressed to Ena L. Yonge and John K. Wright, the letters will be incorporated into their existing correspondence collections, cataloged, and made available for viewing! And now, with a little puzzling, we have put a years-old AGSL mystery to rest.