In the seventeenth century, when only the eastern fringes of the United States were populated, map makers were already at work, charting “those known parts in that unknowne worlde.” Ten of their maps, showing U.S. development, are displayed in the Carol McDonald Gardner Rare Book Room at the St. Louis Public Library, 1301 Olive Street. The exhibit is open to the public from noon to 5 p.m. Monday through Thursday and on alternating Friday afternoons and Saturdays from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.
John Speed’s map of “America with Those Known Parts in the Unknowne Worlde, Both People and Manner of Buildings Described and Inlarged” has both the earliest date and longest title of the maps on view. This map is in the second edition of an atlas printed by John Dawson for George Humble in 1631, the first general atlas published by an Englishman. A facsimile of a 1649 map contrasts artists’ portrayals of little known areas during the same era.
In 1733 Henry Popple in London issued “A Map of the British Empire in America” showing adjacent French and Spanish settlements, the most detailed of the North American interior of any map published to that date. An early American imprint is William Winterbotham’s 1796 map showing boundaries established by the peace treaty of 1783. Ten years later, John Cary, of the distinguished British family of cartographers, published a “new map” characterized by his usual simple beauty and accuracy according to information available at the time.
Other maps from the library collection on display are an 1812 map of John Melish, and extensive traveler and first professional geographer of teh U.S., and a map of 1833 by David Burr, topographer to the U.S. Post Office Department, later named geographer to the House of Representatives in 1832, and, in 1855, appointed by President Franklin Pierce as first surveyor-general of the Utah Territory. A German map records the waves of western exploration during the 1820s and ’30s. An atlas published by Sidney E. Morse in 1842 first used a new process, cerography, of his invention. Earlier maps were reproduced by copper on steel engraving, or occasionally from woodcuts. Commercial cartographers included in the exhibit are Anthony Finley, whose imagination substituted for fact in his maps of the unknown western area of 1824, and Humphrey Phelps (1851).
“The United States in Maps 1621- 1851,” will remain on view at the Main Library, 1301 Olive Street, for the next several months.
Originally published in The Paper, December 1977.
Read this article in the original newspaper issue.
Archival transcription note: The exhibit title prints 1621–1851 while the earliest map described is 1631. The printed “and extensive traveler,” “teh” and “copper on steel” are retained.
Original source: SD_Times1977_12.pdf, printed page(s) 10; PDF page(s) 10.
