Carte de la Virginie et du Maryland

Second edition of Vaugondy’s reduction of Fry and Jefferson’s monumental map of Virginia, Maryland and Delaware.

The original source for this map was a wall map of the same region produced by Joshua Fry and Peter Jefferson (father to Thomas). They had already been commissioned to survey several large tracts of land in this region, particularly the property of Lord Fairfax as well as surveys of the borders between Virginia and North Carolina and Virginia and Maryland in 1740 and 1750. This developed into a commission by the acting Governor of Virginia on behalf of the Board of Trade for a survey of the whole of Virginia including the virgin lands of the western region and the Appalachian mountains. The first printed map was issued in c.1751 and immediately superseded all previous maps of the region. The Fry-Jefferson map was issued over the next thirty years in multiple formats, including segmented and linen backed, as a separate issue and as part of Thomas Jeffery’s important “American Atlas”. However, the most important geographical updates were made in the first four editions to 1755. It became the template for all maps of the region for the next half a century.

Robert de Vaugondy, one of the foremost commercial French map makers of the time, reduced the original to add it to his “Atlas Universel.” On the whole, Vaugondy follows the Fry Jefferson map faithfully, crediting them on the cartouche. However, on this second edition, still confusingly dated 1755, Vaugondy adds a much changed geo-political aspect to the cartography. The western border between Pennsylvania and Maryland now extends to the western edge of the map. A large section of the former Fairfax Lands are now part of Maryland. The Fairfax Line has been removed although a hand drawn border acts as a separation between Maryland and an odd region bearing both the names of Louisiana and Virginia. Further anomaly is added by the removal of the western border of Virginia present on the first edition of the map. This new region, bordered in yellow, stretches from the western edge of the map to the coast of the Atlantic Ocean. The western border of the much reduced Fairfax Lands now runs along the Shenandoah River. This geo-political interpretation seems to be unique to this edition of Vaugondy’s map and was quickly corrected in the third edition, tentatively dated two years later, which restored the western border of Virginia as first shown in 1755.

This second edition of the map seems far more unusual in the market than the first edition.

One of the most interesting details on both maps is the inclusion of the family names associated with the great plantations of Virginia. Of particular note is the placement of the name “Washington” a short distance south of the town of Belhaven, a disused name for Alexandria. This plantation is placed next to Little Hunting Creek, the name by which it was known before its name change to Mount Vernon. A young George Washington spent his youth there as the ward of his half-brother Lawrence, after the death of his father at age eleven. He would then go on to inherit Mount Vernon in 1752.

Original colour. [USA9551]