A place to discuss North Carolina's cartographic history
Freydeck suddenly appeared west of the Blue Ridge (in current day Ashe County) on several English and French maps of North America published in 1755. By the end of the 18th Century, Freydeck was gone. What is the origin of this extinct North Carolina place name?
William D. Cooke published an outline map of North Carolina, primarily for legislators, in 1852 and another in 1872. No surviving copies of the 1852 map, or the final version of the 1872 map are currently known. Has anyone seen one of these maps?
Samuel Pearce published a huge map of North Carolina in 1859, embellished with decorative elements at the top and bottom. It represents the final map printed from the copper plates first used to print the 1833 MacRae-Brazier map.
A most peculiar wall map of North Carolina was printed in about 1858. Decorative elements were borrowed from a number of NY county maps.
The 1833 MacRae-Brazier map of North Carolina, after lying dormant for two decades, made multiple reappearances in the 1850s. In Chapter 2, we’ll discuss the second state of the map, published by Wellington Williams in 1854.
The 1857 wall map of North Carolina, published by William D. Cooke, is one of the rarest 19th Century maps of the state. Learn more about its publication history and the various states of the map.
A very rare untitled map of Virginia and the Carolinas was published by Joshua Kocherthal in Germany in 1709. Read more about it here.
Minchiate? I had never before heard the term. A previous post described several miniature maps of Carolina, each measuring four inches or less. We have one more to add to the list. Minchiate is an early 16th-century card game, originating in Florence, Italy, and played with a deck of 97 cards.
The old axiom, “good things come in small packages”, certainly holds true in maps. There are some miniature maps of Carolina that are adorable. Let’s take a look at a few maps of the Carolinas that measure no more than four inches.
Carolana, the original name for what is now North Carolina, wandered on maps from present day NC, to Mississippi, and finally to upstate NY.