Letters, documents, pamphlets, photographs, scrapbook, and field notes of Jesse A. Duck, topographer with the United States Geological Survey (USGS) from 1908 to 1941. The collection spans Duck's childhood in New Lisbon, Ohio until his retirement from the USGS in Illinois. Highlights include career-related and official documents, photographs of Duck’s military service as First Lieutenant in the Army’s Topographic Branch (likely at Fort Warren, Boston, during World War I), and two notebooks documenting over 6 years of surveying work in Illinois, Missouri, and Iowa from April 1927 to November 1933.