Roland Thorpe Fenton was born in Melrose, Massachusetts, on May 21, 1891. In 1917, he joined the Army as a Second Lieutenant in Company B, 103d Machine-Gun Battalion, 26th Infantry Division, and deployed to the Western Front of World War I. By the start of World War II, Fenton had risen to the rank of Colonel and commanded a Quartermaster Unit in the European Theater of Operations.

The University of Texas Libraries acquired Colonel Roland T. Fenton's maps long after his death on November 25, 1965. Col. Fenton's family donated his military effects to the Army Heritage Center who offered UT Libraries the maps to fill in missing maps from the online Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection . They exceed our expectations. The field printing and annotations transform ordinary topographic maps into classified documents, making this an exceptional collection. With little personal information about Col. Roland T. Fenton available, his map collection has to be the means to tell his story.