Details
Title Everts, Louis Humphrey
Date April 14, 1836-1924
Description Louis Humphrey Everts, pioneer map, atlas, and county history publisher and entrepreneur, born in East Otto, New York on April 14, 1836, worked with Philadelphia lithographers and operated in Philadelphia 1874-1900s. Everts moved with his family to Geneva, Kane County, Illinois in 1851. In 1859 he married his first wife, Louisa J. Ferson and worked as a clerk in St. Charles, Illinois. The same year he relocated to Chicago after his wife's death and worked in a dry goods store before he joined the military in 1861. He met his first business partner, Thomas Hinckley Thompson, while serving in the military, and between 1867 and 1872, the newly established partnership of Thompson & Everts began creating county atlases with lithographic illustrations of Iowa and Illinois. From 1870 to 1872, Thompson & Everts contracted Philadelphia lithographers Norman Friend and Thomas Hunter to complete the engraving and printing of their projects.
Everts partnership with Thompson dissolved, but he continued to produce atlases in Chicago under the partnership names Evert, Baskin & Stewart (1872-1873), Everts & Stewart (1873-1874), and L. H. Everts & Company (1874-1875) and expanded his geographical focus to New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and New York. The expansion resulted in the relocation of his business to Philadelphia in 1874. County histories and religious reference works began to dominate his business efforts from the mid-1870s through the 1880s, under the partnership of Everts, Ensign & Everts and other associated companies.
Everts non-publishing endeavors included real estate investments in Washington state and shares in the Dakota Mortgage Company. He served as president of the Cold Blast Feather Company in Chicago and invested in the manufacture of coffee pots.
Everts married Adeline H. Utley in 1872 in Illinois, a few years before they relocated east, and had one daughter, Louisa Everts. This marriage ended in the late 1880s and he married Emma M. Montgomery of Philadelphia in 1892.
Everts businesses suffered losses in the 1890s and he filed for bankruptcy in 1900. He formed the Century Map Company to continue atlas publishing in 1902. He retired in the 1910s and in 1918, admitted himself into the National Home for Disabled Volunteer Soldiers in Dayton, Ohio, but by 1920 had returned to Philadelphia. He died on January 26, 1924 and was buried in West Laurel Hill Cemetery.
Is part of Philadelphia on Stone Biographical Dictionary of Lithographers
References See Friend, Norman; Hunter, Thomas; and Landis, Enos Y.
Call number Philadelphia on Stone Biographical Dictionary of Lithographers
Bibliographic citation Census 1860, 1870, 1900, 1910
Moak, Louis H. Everts: American Atlas Publisher and Entrepreneur; Coordinates Series b, No. 11., 2009, http://sunysb.edu/libmap/coordinates/seriesb/no11/b11.htm
Philadelphia Business and City Directories, 1875-1921 (intermittently)
U.S. National Homes for Disabled Volunteer Soldiers, 1866-1938