"Globes and other cartographic instruments served well as an exemplary archive of knowledge, quickly adding the 'discoveries' of explorers such as Captain Cook, and modeling an ideal: the creation of a natural and orderly society."

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

IV. Curiosity Completed

Wilson continued to operate his backwoods shop in Bradford, but eventually success forced him to open an urban shop. Events deep in the Pacific and across the North American continent captured Wilson’s imagination, and as he gained new information, he corrected his globes. On "A NEW AMERICAN TERRESTRIAL GLOBE on which the PRINCIPAL PLACES of the KNOWN WORLD are ACCURATELY laid down with the traced attempts of CAPTAIN COOK to discover a Southern Continent by James Wilson, 1811," Wilson filled out the continent with place names and river systems.

In 1817 Wilson's sons opened a factory in Albany, New York, to meet the increased demand for their globes and maps. Knowing there was a market for inexpensive maps, the Wilsons even produced three-inch terrestrial and celestial globes.

Fig. 10. James Wilson, 3-inch Terrestrial Globe, c. 1820, courtesy of the Library of Congress

The three-inch globes offered less graphic detail than larger maps; citizens of the new nation eager to learn and display their knowledge of the world could easily afford these miniature maps. An 1828 broadside advertised the Wilsons’ full range of three-inch to thirteen-inch globes on mahogany pedestal stands. "THE CORRECTNESS OF THE GEOGRAPHICAL DIVISIONS &C. OF OUR OWN country, and the western hemisphere, renders these globes more useful and interesting to the American geographer, and gives them a decided preference to imported globes, on which this continent is greatly misrepresented." Wilson’s globes were also less expensive than imported ones, "so schools and academies, even private families," could take advantage, with the "popularity and usefulness of Geographical and Astronomical science," facts so apparent to potential customers that it was not necessary to explain either their popularity or utility.

Material objects like Wilson’s globes made the Village Enlightenment. They remind us that we sometimes too readily dismiss the backwoods as a source of information. The modern model of an urban monopoly on curiosity and sophistication fails to capture the intellectual world of James Wilson and his neighbors. Globes and other cartographic instruments served well as an exemplary archive of knowledge, quickly adding the "discoveries" of explorers such as Captain Cook, and modeling an ideal: the creation of a natural and orderly society. Commerce and culture came together in a process, really a transformation, that I have called elsewhere the Village Enlightenment, where men and women made a business of providing and using cultural commodities in the hinterlands. Entrepreneurs like Wilson took advantage of the curiosity fostered in schoolrooms and popular books and helped promote the democratization of knowledge and the commercialization of the countryside. This widespread movement made rural peoples’ homes looks very different in the decades after the War for Independence and celebrated the new nation’s maturity, making something European into something American and moving the center of that story from its familiar setting of Philadelphia or New York far into inland communities. Bradford, Vermont, a town perched along the upper Connecticut River where James Wilson set up his globe-making shop, was the unlikely station for such a story. The farmer-blacksmith’s remarkable saga offers a vision of one, only one of many, backwoods savants navigating among the arts and sciences to produce new commercial goods and cultural identities. James Wilson’s curiosity opens up all sorts of possibilities of learning from artifactual evidence: a lesson well worth sharing.

Further Reading:

The study of Vermont cartography begins with J. Kevin Graffagnino, The Shaping of Vermont: From the Wilderness to the Centennial, 1749-1877 (Rutland, Vt., 1983) with its reproduction of maps, account of their makers, and the historical background. Many of the James Wilson documents appear in Leroy E. Kimball, "James Wilson of Vermont, America's First Globe Maker," Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 48 (April 1938): 29-48; Harold W. Haskins, "James Wilson–Globe Maker," Vermont History 27 (October 1959): 319-30.

Wilson also appears in recent studies of Vermont material culture such as Kenneth Zogry’s comprehensive survey of Vermont furniture: The Best the Country Affords: Vermont Furniture, 1765-1850 (Bennington, Vt., 1995) and Celebrating Vermont: Myths and Realities (Middlebury, Vt., 1991) edited by Nancy Price Graff. Upper Valley material culture gets important consideration in Gerald Ward and William Hosley, The Great River: Art & Society of the Connecticut Valley, 1635-1820 (Hartford, 1985). For some keen thinking on the relation of provincial and metropolitan cultural relations in furniture and other material forms, see Kevin Sweeney’s "High Style Vernacular: Lifestyles of the Colonial Elite," in Cary Carson, Ronald Hoffman, and Peter J. Albert, Of Consuming Interests: The Style of Life in the Eighteenth Century (Charlottesville, 1994), 1-58; or Philip Zea’s "Diversity and Regionalism in Rural New England Furniture," in American Furniture (1995). My Village Enlightenment essay is concerned with print materials: "The Village Enlightenment in New England," William and Mary Quarterly 47 (July 1990): 327-46.

Specific studies of the "Greenbush Group" include Windsor County Engravers, 1809-1860 (Montpelier, Vt., 1982); George R. Dalphin and Marcus A. McCorison, "Lewis Robinson–Entrepreneur," Vermont History 30 (Oct 1962): 297-313; Carl Taylor Jr., "George White–Vermont’s ‘Unknown Artist,’" Vermont History 42 (Winter 1974): 3-11; Harold Goddard Rugg, "Isaac Eddy Printer-Engraver," Bibliographical Essays: A Tribute to Wilberforce Eames (Cambridge, 1924): 313-29.

The single most important figure in the "new history of cartography" was J.B. Harley, author of The New Nature of Maps (Baltimore, 2001); the early republic has seen some good recent work by John Rennie Short, Representing the Republic: Mapping the United States, 1600-1900 (New York, 2001) and Martin Bruckner, "Lessons in Geography: Maps, Spellers, and Other Grammars of Nationalism in the Early Republic," American Quarterly 51 (June 1999): 311-44; Matthew Edney, "Reconsidering Enlightenment Geography and Map Making: Reconnaissance, Mapping, Archive," in David N. Livingstone and Charles W. J. Withers, Geography and Enlightenment (Chicago, 1999): 165-98. Denis Cosgrove has written a sweeping and imaginative study of the cartographic imagination and globes: Apollo's Eye: A Cartographic Genealogy of the Earth in the Western Imagination (Baltimore, Md., 2001).

Finally, collectors and historians of maps and globes have been busy online. David Rumsey’s important map collection has thorough documentation and impressive graphics. Library of Congress collections are available in the American Memory collections. Two other useful Websites are the Osher Map Library at the University of Southern Maine with several online exhibitions and Cartographic Curiosities at Yale.