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Found a 1744 map where my hometown in Vermont is just labeled "part of the wilderness"
My grandpa handed me a box of old family papers 3 years ago and I finally went through it last Tuesday. Tucked between tax records was a 1744 French map of New England, and the whole area where my town sits now was just blank with "part of the wilderness" written across it. What got me was the same map labels a random pond 20 miles away, so they knew the water but not the land. I keep wondering how a mapmaker decided one spot was worth naming and the other was nothing. Does anyone here know why colonial maps marked some ponds and skipped whole valleys like that?
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jenny_carr5213d ago
That blank space thing drives me nuts too. My family has a map from the 1770s of upstate New York where our whole valley is empty but some tiny creek twelve miles off got its own label, and I spent way too long trying to figure out why. From what I've read, the mapmakers were mostly fur traders and priests, so they only wrote down water and Native trails since that's what they actually used, and everything else was just filler to them.
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