"Maps have long aided political expansion and cultural consolidation. In the early Republic cartography helped establish an image of an authentically bounded nation."

Curiosities Encountered:
James Wilson and Provincial Cartography in the United States, 1790-1840
David Jaffee

III. Curiosities for Sale

Maps and globes were important products for people eager to see themselves as members of a new nation. What is surprising is that so many of the nation’s early maps came from places like Wilson’s Bradford globe manufactory. Wilson and his Windsor County neighbors formed a remarkable circle of map makers and engravers whose products graced the walls of schoolhouses and homes of Vermont and the entire nation. We sometimes picture a man like Wilson as a sort of solitary genius imagining his way into a world outside rural Vermont. But he was well supplied with coworkers. From the tiny villages of Greenbush and Feltchville a cluster of more than half a dozen rural artisans, printers, and engravers produced visual representations of Vermont, in maps, prints, and illustrated books. The men and women of this "Greenbush group," were connected by partnerships, marriages, apprenticeships, and collaborations. Their intellectual, financial, and family connections helped spread knowledge through the countryside. They helped build a world where Enlightenment and edification were interwoven with the growing commercialization of the countryside. Maps were important components of this new world. They facilitated geographic and economic integration, but they also helped people imagine their nation. Maps have long aided political expansion and cultural consolidation. In the early Republic cartography helped establish an image of an authentically bounded nation. "After the Revolution many Americans self-consciously turned to the discourse of geography to negotiate and transform the representations of personal, regional, and political difference into material figures of national consent," literary scholar Martin Bruckner writes. Whenever they stitched a sampler of the United States or gazed on a state map that made their homes part of a larger whole, they "enacted the nation as a participatory model of coherence."

Fig. 5. James Whitelaw, Map of Vermont, 1810, (second edition of 1796 Whitelaw map), courtesy of the Dartmouth College Library

In fact, state maps, not globes, were the first American cartographic efforts after Independence, and Vermont was or became the first state with a map: William Blodget's "A Topographical Map of the State of Vermont." But Blodgett’s map did little to enhance this map maker’s finances. Scottish surveyor James Whitelaw fared far better; he succeeded Ira Allen as Vermont’s surveyor-general and kept busy securing new surveys of the state's towns. From these surveys, he compiled his "A Correct Map of the State of Vermont," to which he added details about the state's commercial and manufacturing activities. The legend on Whitelaw’s map included familiar icons such as forts and meeting houses, but he added grist, saw, and fulling mills, along with grammar schools and other signs of a landscape of industrial and cultural improvement. The map's large cartouche contained a delightful pastoral scene that featured the ongoing work of agricultural development taking place throughout the state: an improving farm with its cleared fields, a stump in foreground, and a two story farmhouse in the back (fig. 6).

Fig. 6. James Wilson, cartouche of Map of Vermont, 1810, courtesy of the Library of Congress

Whitelaw’s publisher was New Haven's Doolittle in 1796, but later editions (including an 1810 map engraved by James Wilson) would come from Vermont sources.

About 1810, a man named Isaac Eddy established a shop in the little hamlet of Greenbush in a western corner of Weathersfield. Eddy and his son, apprentices, and business partners would turn this remote village into a significant center of early national engraving, especially cartographic work. The Eddys produced an amazing volume of maps, illustrated books, and even globes. Eddy embarked upon a modest program of imprints and engraved plates for the "First Vermont Edition" of the Bible along with a series of other local publications.

His most ambitious collaboration, however, came with James Wilson on their Chronology Delineated / To Illustrate the History of Monarchical Revolutions (fig. 7).

Fig. 7. Isaac Eddy and James Wilson, Chronology Delineated / To Illustrate the History of Monarchical Revolutions, 1813, courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society

These two rural entrepreneurs and encyclopaedists mapped the long history of the world, marrying commerce and culture together in two 36-x-21-inch sheets to be placed together, graphically representing the growth of the nations of the world from the time of Adam to the present. Eddy published this visual history to bring the allure and exoticism of its "French Historian and Chronologer" to an American audience with "the most concise and accurate system of chronology ever published," offering the "Patrons of the Fine Arts . . . useful, amusing and ornamental" information.

Eddy and Wilson obviously shared a kind of world vision. Knowledge more local sufficed for other intellectual entrepreneurs. Whitelaw's Vermont map, for example, had a long life among other Windsor County engravers. Ebenezer Hutchinson brought out new editions in 1821 and 1824. In new editions, a vision of place transformed by enterprise and industry gradually replaced the pastoral scenes depicted in 1795 and 1810. Two cartouches graced the 1824 map; one depicted the thriving village of Montpelier from the mill point; the other was a fantastic scene looking west (fig. 8).

Fig. 8. Cartouche of Ebenezer Hutchinson, Vermont from Actual Survey, 1824, courtesy of the Dartmouth College Library

The wilderness with its thunderous waterfall and roving wildlife was divided by an earthen urn with the map’s title, the state seal, and an eagle above the whole, leading on to a cultivated scene with a farmer and his livestock in the foreground, a plough crossing the fields in the middle ground, and then a river with a puffing steamboat going by. Across the shore stood an urban scene.

The Greenbush group innovated with new map styles and advanced production techniques. Another Eddy apprentice, George White struck out on his own with some smaller and less detailed maps of the two states straddling the Connecticut River. Lewis Robinson, yet one more product of Eddy’s workshop, pushed the manufacturing process forward, and built the first "map manufactory" in Windsor County. In the second quarter of the nineteenth century, Lewis Robinson became the leading purveyor of maps in northern New England, a major producer in the entire United States, all without leaving his hometown (Fig. 9).

Fig. 9. Lewis Robinson, Map of New Hampshire and Vermont, 1845, courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society

The little village of South Reading stayed the site of his map factory for thirty-eight years; his chief products maps of Vermont and New Hampshire. They ranged in price from thirty-three cents to three dollars, often marketed through a network of peddlers and traveling salesmen. Robinson sold nearly six thousand maps between 1840 and 1855 alone and made his little village "a thriving backwoods center of commercial American cartography," as Vermont cartographic historian J. Kevin Graffagnino has written.