On Tuesday, July 8, 2003, at 04:58 PM, macbd1 wrote:

>> Tom Apple said July 07, 2003:
>> ..... I'd love to find another period map of the area showing PH.
>
> Tom, click on the following link:
> http://lcweb2.loc.gov/ammem/gmdhtml/trnsmapPlaces02.html
> (Transportation maps at Library of Congress)
OK, before we get too carried away with the issues of map accuracy,
allow me to digress into the maps involved. The 1826 map is the Hermann
Boye map. It has inaccuracies, transposed segments (New Kent County
between Providence Forge & Cumberland on the Pamunkey) and it is a very
general guide. At the scale it's drawn, it cannot be anything else but.
The successor map of 1859 is also basically the same map with even less
information for some reason.

The problem with Civil War maps is that one has to be careful that
they're not re-copied maps of an earlier era. There's a map of Prince
George County which was done during the Civil War. It shows the
courthouse in the third rather than the fourth location, it shows slave
quarters on Fort Lee which were not used later than the 1830's, the
calligraphy is not of the middle 19th century style and has other
errors. The map was apparently checked out of the Library of Congress
or some other DC map repository at the beginning of the Civil War and
copied. Trouble is that it was originally a map for the War of 1812 or
thereabouts and showed landmarks of that time. A number of CW maps are
re-draws of the Boye series or are derivatives of earlier ones. The
problem with some of the Rev. War maps is that they are very difficult
to correlate with modern features. I haven't seen the 1781 Arnold map
so I cannot comment on it.

The area in question is one of those maddening bits of Va that never
was really mapped in detail until the USGS did it.

Lyle Browning

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