: The Concord Museum is exhibiting "Degrees of Latitude; Maps of
America from the Colonial Williamsburg Collection" through
October 19. This is the exhibition's only New England venue.
Organized by The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, the show uses
maps as a point of departure for understanding the history of
American settlement and colonization. These 72 extraordinary
historic maps and an atlas of early America were selected for
their rarity, historical importance and aesthetic beauty.
"Maps tell us what was known or believed about the land, suggest
how people traveled and traded and recorded routes taken across
oceans and continents," said Margaret Pritchard, Colonial
Williamsburg curator of prints, maps and wallpaper since 1982.
"By the Seventeenth Century, the profits generated from the
American colonies created a need for maps to facilitate trade and
promote new settlements. Maps substantiated land claims, settled
boundary disputes and recorded the battles and adventures of the
early colonists."
Pritchard is co-author of Degrees of Latitude: Mapping
Colonial America, 1590-1787, with Henry G. Taliaferro, a
dealer of rare maps and prints in New York. The catalog is
jointly published by the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation and
Harry N. Abrams, Inc.
This exhibition features the first printed English record in 1590
of Sir Walter Raleigh's attempts to establish a colony in the New
World at Roanoke Island; Captain John Smith's 1624 map of the New
England region that shows "Plimouth" six years before the
Pilgrims landed; a Seventeenth Century depiction of North America
showing California as an island, a common misunderstanding on
maps of that period; and Carver's 1775 map of Boston showing the
troop movements in Lexington and Concord during the first battle
of the Revolutionary War.
Also on view are highlights such as the map that was used to
determine the geographic boundaries of the new nation at the
Treaty of Paris in 1783, which concluded the American Revolution;
the first English map that illustrated the American flag; the
first sea chart to use Mercator's projection, a way of more
accurately representing the earth's curvature and relative
distances in a flat map.
More highlights are a map commissioned and owned by Benjamin
Franklin that shows the course and dimensions of the gulf stream;
Ratzer's "Plan of the City of New York" first published in
October 1770 and described as perhaps the finest map of an
American city produced in the Eighteenth Century; and The
Custis Atlas, once owned by Virginian John Custis IV,
passed through generations of the Custis family and familiar to
two other prominent Virginians who were related by marriage,
George Washington and Robert E. Lee.
The exhibition is accompanied by a full calendar of programs for
travelers, historians, cartographers, collectors, students and
families alike.
The Concord Museum is at the intersection of Lexington Road
and Cambridge Turnpike. For information, 978-369-9609 or visit
www.concordmuseum.org.
