He would be one of five children born to Marmaduke and Mary (Davis) Ferguson. On November 6, 1846, on a farm in Perry County, Illinois, Orlando Ferguson was born. A man who has largely been lost to history. That creator, from Hot Springs, was Orlando Ferguson. Since, a couple of other copies have surfaced, even though it had been spread far and wide by its creator. When the Library of Congress received the map, it was only one of two known copies that had survived, and it was the only one completely intact.

Simply, his map looked as if a donut had been smashed into it, then removed, leaving behind its shape on the map. To explain this phenomenon, a fact most everyone knew about because of the horizon, he imprinted earth with an inverse toroid. It attempted to explain what is known as the Columbus phenomenon, the perception of a ship, that is coming over the horizon, first only being able to be detected by its mast, which gets taller and taller the closer it gets to you until the entire ship is in view. But it wasn’t just any depiction of a flat earth.

What made this map so interesting was that it depicted the idea of a flat earth. After all, the Library of Congress houses many maps that are older. Getting to Homuth, it had passed through the hands of John Hildreth, an eighth-grade teacher, who had received it from his grandfather, a former resident of Hot Springs, S.D.īy the time the map finally arrived at the Library of Congress, it was nearly 120 years old. It had been donated by Don Homuth, a former North Dakota state senator. In September of 2011, a strange map arrived at the Library of Congress. The famous Square Earth Map by Orlando Ferguson.

Flat earth - orlando ferguson