The Finest Map of Vermont of the 18th Century

SOTZMANN, D[aniel] F[riedrich]/ EBELING, C. [Hamburg, 1796]

SOTZMANN, D[aniel] F[riedrich]/ EBELING, C.  [Hamburg: 1796] VERMONT entworfen von D.F. Sotzmann. 27 x 18 ¼ inches. Copperplate engraving with original wash and outline color. A bit of soiling and discoloration in outer margins, else a very fine example.              

An elegant, richly detailed and rare map of Vermont, which, remarkably, was the best to date of the state as it was the work of two German geographers who never visited America.  It depicts the state’s natural geography, including lakes, rivers, streams, and even waterfalls, as well as the Green Mountains and lesser areas of elevation. Political boundaries are shown, with state, county and township borders differentiated by varying widths of dotted line. There is also much information on the human geography, including roads; industrial establishments such as grist mills, saw mills, and iron works; public edifices such as meeting houses and forts; and even the names of hundreds of individual landowners.

The Sotzmann-Ebeling maps are "among the rarest of cartographic Americana for the closing decade of the eighteenth century." "Only a small number of American collections, among them the Library of Congress and Harvard University, have copies of all ten published maps" (Ristow).  This map was one of only 10 produced by Ebeling and Sotzmann out of a proposed 18 for the Atlas von Nordamerika, which was to supplement a multi-volume history of America.  Since the atlas was never completed, the maps were published separately, which accounts for their rarity.  The maps are also marked by a precision and elegance in their engraving that far exceeded that of the maps they were based on. Ebeling’s map library eventually made its way back to America, where it was purchased by a Boston collector and eventually became the nucleus of the Harvard Map Collection.

Ebeling maintained a correspondence with the leading lights of American science, who provided the source material, both printed and manuscript, which Sotzmann sifted through, compiled and reconciled with a highly critical eye. Thus, as with all of the Ebeling-Sotzmann maps, Vermont is a fusion of the best available sources. Two sources can be identified with near certainty. The treatment of streams and rivers is based closely on William Blodget’s unobtainably rare Topographical Map of the State of Vermont (1789), while the toponymy and town and county boundaries were obtained from Vermont Surveyor General James Whitelaw, either directly or via drafts of his Correct Map of the State of Vermont, which like Sotzmann’s map was published in 1796; the depiction of Franklin, Orleans, Caledonia and Essex Counties closely follows that of Whitelaw.

What remains a mystery, however, is Sotzmann’s treatment of Vermont’s mountainous topography, which bears absolutely no resemblance to that of either Blodget or Whitelaw. Whether Whitelaw provided Ebeling with information that didn’t appear on his published map, or the latter had some other source, I cannot say.

Cobb, Vermont, #124; Graffagnino, Shaping of Vermont, #17 (and #4 in accompanying portfolio); Phillips, p.247; Rumsey ; Background from Ristow, American Maps and Mapmakers, pp.169-178. Background on Sotzmann’s maps from Ralph H. Brown, “Early Maps of the United States: The Ebeling-Sotzmann Maps of the Northern Seaboard States,” in Geographical Review, vol. 30 no. 3 (Jul. 1940), pp. 471-479, and also Walter Ristow, American Maps and Mapmakers, pp.169-178.

 

Sold