The 1860 Walling State Map

Henry F. Walling, the prolific Boston map publisher and surveyor, issued a huge state wall map in 1859 and 1860. This 5′ x 5′ map (so large it came with wooden rollers) showed every road in the state and every house and business. The immense amount of detail makes for a fairly “busy” map, but it is a very important document of Vermont history.

The edition shown here is the final, 1860 edition. Because the map is so huge, we can’t post the whole map on-line, but most of it can be seen on the State Maps Database at www.old-map.com.

Here we will show a few excerpts, such as part of the Middlebury village map, and the Ludlow-Cavendish area where the Crown Point Military Road is shown.

To see more details of these maps, just click on the image. The Walling map seems to portray every large building, but only a few are named as to owners. Space would not allow all names. What criteria were used to determine which names appear on the map? Were these the Subscribers (the map was sold pre-publication) or were these the owners of the biggest buildings?

The Walling state map is the most detailed old map to show the route of the Crown Point Military Road, the famous path which was built through the Vermont Wilderness a century before this map. No prior maps of that road have the detail of this 1860 picture. The route shown here may or not be correct, but since it was drawn at such an early time, it may be quite close to the truth. In this excerpt the Crown Point Road is the dashed line at the top of the map, beneath the word “Ticonderoga”.

Note the “Indian Encampment” and the “20 Mile Encampment” along the road. I wonder whether these are these historical sites from 1759 when the soldiers were building the road or some sort of map-contemporary site (1860s).

Within each town’s boundary are some statistics as noted on the Legend.

Mapmaker Walling explained some of his technical standards in a note on the map which ends “the details are from various local surveys, made principally under the direction of H.F. Walling. ” The local surveys referred to were those which led the 1850s county maps – detailed county road maps which, like this state map, were very detailed. The county maps (there are 11 for Vermont’s 154 counties) were made between 1854 and 1859. Eight of the eleven were made by Walling.

Mapmaking in the mid-19th century was typically done by private businessmen, and they had to raise money to pay for the surveys and printing. Maps were sold pre-publication to subscribers who got a copy of the finished map and the honor of having their names recorded for posterity on the map.

The Walling map features a large Geological map of Vermont as an inset