Athens, Ga. – Harold R. (Huddy) Hudgens Jr., an Albany resident who holds a degree in landscape architecture from the University of Georgia, has helped brighten the walls of the UGA Map Library.
A regular user of the Map Library, Hudgens urged his Albany friends, artist Rena Divine and her husband, William T. Divine Jr., a former member of the University System of Georgia Board of Regents, to donate four artist’s proofs from Rena’s series “Plantations of Southwest Georgia.” Primarily a wildlife watercolorist, Rena has produced some of the most stunning paintings of quail, dove and ducks in the Southeast. In the early 1980s, former Georgia Gov. George Busbee often would present Rena’s print of brown thrashers, Georgia’s state bird, to visiting dignitaries.
“This was a very generous gift from the Divines and we’re very pleased that Huddy helped facilitate this,” said Hallie Pritchett, map librarian. “We’ve had the prints custom framed and hung on the walls here. They’re quite lovely and attract a lot of attention from our patrons. In fact, Huddy took a photograph of the Map Library staff in front of one of the framed prints for the Divines the last time he was up here – I understand they were quite pleased to see it.”
The Map Library, located south of campus at the intersection of Whitehall Road and Milledge Avenue, is a research-level cartographic collection whose substantial holdings include maps, aerial photography and remote sensed imagery, atlases, digital spatial data and reference materials. It has several notable collections including the largest collection of aerial photography of the State of Georgia outside of the National Archives. The paper collection consists of over 230,000 photos from the late 1930s hrough the late 1980s.
The Map Library also holds all of the Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps for Georgia cities and towns published from 1880 – 1985 in both print and microfilm formats. Originally designed for fire insurance assessment, these large-scale, color-coded maps of U.S. cities and towns relate the location and use of buildings, as well as the materials employed in their construction. One of the most used collections is current and historical U.S. Geological Survey topographic maps for the entire U.S. and its territories as well as thematic maps published by USGS.
For more information, see http://www.libs.uga.edu/maproom/.
