In 1903 Carl Albert Kroll (1882-1982) immigrated from Germany to the U. S., finding work as a drafting technician at the Moran Brothers shipbuilding company. By 1910, Kroll was the manager at O. P. Anderson Map & Blue Print Company. The following year he acquired both the Anderson Map Company and the Washington Map and Blueprint Company to form the Kroll Map Company. Kroll sold the company in 1920 to friend and employee John Loacker (1874-1964), whose grandson still runs the family business in Belltown as of 2019.

The map pictured here is a print of a hand-drawn Kroll master map of Seattle’s Central Business District, identifying commercial and public buildings from just north of today's Seattle Center to just south of King Street Station, and from Elliott Bay east to Broadway on Capitol Hill. The map is undated; master versions of maps were revised as construction and new businesses changed the city.

Caption information source: "The mapmaker, a 106-year-old Seattle business, and a strange request for a map," The Seattle Times, March 23, 2018, p. 100.
Caption information source: "National Guard Armories in Washington," by Duane Colt Denfeld, Ph.D., HistoryLink.org Essay 10452.