Newfound Old Maps of Maine

Well, New to Me, at Least!

Paul van den Brink, on twitter, just let me know that there are a few maps of Maine in the records of the Holland Land Company. I think he is referring to the collection scanned in the 1980s by Fredonia State University in Fredonia, N.Y. (Safran 1988). The Holland Land Company bought and sold off much of the westernmost part of New York state, in and around Buffalo. There is something of a literature about its division of the land and the associated maps (esp. by Bill Wyckoff, but see also Pedley). The Holland Land Company was also a target of the Bingham-Baring group who speculated in lands in Maine. and the company’s archives include a few maps of Maine. I have previously discussed William Bingham’s land speculation in Maine. The maps that Dr. van den Brink pointed me towards supplement those discussed in that earlier piece.

In particular, there is a manuscript “Plan of the Province of Main” that is curiously similar to the Plan of the District of Main that I discussed in that earlier post. This ms is labeled as “Laid down from Osgood Carlon’s [sic] Map & other Information by Chas: de Krafft.” This strongly suggests that Carlton prepared the maps for Bingham, and that de Krafft prepared the neat copies that Bingham’s agent took to Europe. A detailed comparison of the maps would be an interesting exercise. Here’s a very low-resolution image from the New York Heritage site:

Charles de Krafft after Osgood Carleton, “Plan of the Province of Main”'; click on image to see fuller information. Original provided by Fredonia State University via New York Heritage.

These maps add more to the story of the mapping of Maine, as in my bicentennial exhibition at the Osher Map Library, University of Southern Maine.

References

Pedley, Mary Sponberg. 1990. “Land Company Mapping in North America: Fiefdom in the New Republic.” Imago Mundi 42: 106–13.

Safran, Franciska. 1988. “The Preservation of the Holland Land Company Records.” New York History 69, no. 2: 163–83.

Wyckoff, William. 1981. “Assessing Land Quality in Western New York: The Township Surveys of 1797–1799.” Surveying and Mapping 41, no. 3: 315–25.

———. 1986. “Land Subdivision on the Holland Purchase in Western New York State, 1797–1820.” Journal of Historical Geography 12, no. 2: 142–61.

———. 1988. The Developer’s Frontier: The Making of the Western New York Landscape. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press.