The First Maps of the White Mountains

The idea of seeing the Whites from the coast may be farfetched today, but the projected 40,000 Abenaki whose history was already happening utilized an economy that influenced the atmosphere much more gently. The indigenous relationship with the present-day White Mountains and Mt. Washington in particular was one of reverence – they purportedly did not venture deep into the mountains due to their sacred religious status (Prins, 1994).

While it is difficult to know with certainty whether the Abenaki explicitly mapped the White Mountains, historians are familiar with their cartographic practices more generally. It is safe to assume that a variety of cartographic representations of these mountains were created and that the unchanged lines that separate what we now call the Presidential Range from the sky have been drawn for much longer than our artifacts indicate.

Since maps are products of cultures, if those groups seek to expand their claim to territory, mapping must logically precede expansion. Cartography may be aptly identified as fundamental to the process of colonialism.

….The end outcome of these colonialist acts of representation was that what is “known” about indigenous peoples of the Americas is known only from a European point of view.

Adam Keul, Project Humanist

Left: Indian Trails by Chester B. Price: The Lakes Region of New Hampshire, 1956
Courtesy of David Govatski
Right: Wabanaki Country. Stacy Morin. Orrington, ME. 1989
Courtesy of David Govatski

Early Maps

The broad sweep of the history of White Mountain region’s mapping begins with the description of the first known European map, a hand-drawn sketch from 1642, whose purpose, we may presume, was to give an impression of the territories that the English settlers might hope at least to explore, if not occupy.
Adam Apt

John Foster. A Map of New-England.
1677. Shown here is the 1826 facsimile

This celebrated woodcut map is the first map printed in British North America, and is also the first to show the White Mountains by name, though not the first map to depict mountains in the region. The London printing includes the mistaken label “Wine Hills.” John Foster was the printer and is presumed to have been the map’s Boston engraver. Shown here is the facsimile included in the 1826 reprint of a different book.

Left: Map of New Hampshire. Daniel Sotzmann. Hamburg. 1796
Courtesy of Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division
Right: A New Map of New Hampshire. Jeremy Belknap. Boston. 1791
Courtesy of Adam Apt

Many early state maps such as those by Sotzmann, Belknap, and Carrigain, relied mainly on local resources, and played a role in the effort to define the fledgling state in word and image.

Click here to read more Belknap's 'A Map of New Hampshire'

Jeremy Belknap published this map in the second of the three volumes of his History of New Hampshire. It identifies a number of mountains, included, for example, Royce and Kearsarge, and a number of rivers, including, for the first time, the Cutler River, which Belknap evidently named for the Reverend Manasseh Cutler (1742-1823), his companion on his 1784 expedition to Mount Washington.

Click here to read more about Sotzmann's 'Map of New Hampshire'

This map is one of several state maps that Sotzmann engraved for a German atlas of North America that was never completed. His maps were based on earlier maps, and the New Hampshire map is based on ones by Holland and Jeremy Belknap (see elsewhere in this exhibition). This is the first map to indicate Mount Washington, here labeled “Washington B.” (for “Berg,” meaning “mountain”). The first reference to “Mount Washington” in print occurs in the third volume of Jeremy Belknap’s History (1792) where the wording of the reference suggests that the name was becoming common usage. The map shows, however roughly, the Presidential Range, oriented from northeast to southwest. None of the other ranges or peaks is depicted in a way that conveys much accurate information of size, extent, or orientation.

Franklin Leavitt’s first map of the White Mountains, published in 1852, was one of the first three published maps of the White Mountains. The others were Conant’s “Map of the Mountain and Lake Regions of New-Hampshire,” and the Tripp and Osgood “Map of the White and Franconia Mountains,” both of which were published the same year. It is notable that these first three maps were tourist maps, not topographical maps.

Click here to read more about the three earliest White Mountain maps

Leavitt Map

Early in his life, Franklin Leavitt worked at the Notch House, an early inn near Crawford Notch. He also helped to build trails and the Carriage Road (now the Auto Road), and he worked as a guide. With the coming of the railroad to the White Mountains, he evidently concluded that there would be a market for a tourist map, and being unusually entrepreneurial, he drew one, and took it to one of the leading printing houses in Boston, Bufford’s Lithography, for reproduction.

David Tatham, an art historian who has written the authoritative articles on Leavitt, his maps, and his writings, observes, “As a rule, a mountain was shown if it was prominently visible from a hotel veranda, had a bridle path, was a notable landmark, or was the site of a memorable incident in local history.” He further suggests that someone, likely Bufford, the lithographer, improved Leavitt’s spelling on the first map, which is notably worse in Leavitt’s later maps. The scale used in the map is variable; distances are not consistently in proportion.

Leavitt continually issued new maps, which except in two instances were not really new editions of a previous map of his, but entirely new maps.

Tripp and Osgood Map

By 1850, there were 488 miles of railroad through New Hampshire, and the next year, the railroads began to bring tourists, in addition to explorers and adventurers, to the White Mountains. This map, published in 1852, was one of the first three maps of the White Mountains. (The others were Conant’s “Map of the Mountain and Lake Regions of New-Hampshire,” and Franklin Leavitt’s first map, both of which were published the same year.) Its crudity, in large part a reflection of its limited purpose, which was to encourage railroad travel to the region, was most decidedly not to be a topographical map. In this, it contrasts sharply with the Bond map, published one year later.

There were a couple of other versions of this map published in the next year or two, in different sizes, and with more hotels added.

Conant Map

Missing from this exhibition, but important to mention as part of the history of White Mountain maps, is an 1852 map made by Marshall Conant. The map shares with the first map issued by Franklin Leavitt, the distinction of being the first published maps of the White Mountains as a distinct region, having been issued in 1852.

The Conant map, however, is centered on the Lakes region, and so cuts off the northern part of the White Mountains.

It uses a cartographic convention of the time, not generally used later for the White Mountains, of representing mountain ranges as what today we call “caterpillars.”

Leavitt’s 1879 map of the White Mountains on view in the exhibition. Courtesy of Adam Apt

Comparative view of the heights of the principal mountains in the world. Boston. Sculpt. 1820. Courtesy of Adam Apt

Click here to read more about Guyot's 1860 map

Guyot’s map, printed by one of the premier European cartographic publishers, was published twice: First by Petermann, and second, as an illustration for Guyot’s article “On the Appalachian Mountain System,” in American Journal of Science and Arts. The latter established the Appalachians (also, at the time, known as the Allegheny Mountains) as a single mountain chain. Guyot’s article reports in tables his extensive determinations of Appalachian summit elevations, but some values on this map are Bond’s, and are identifiable by their rounding to the nearest 100 feet.

Arnold Henri Guyot (1807-1884), a professor at Princeton, an associate of Louis Agassiz, and one of America’s most distinguished geologists and geographers, had emigrated from Switzerland in 1848 as a member of the vast wave of central European immigrants in the wake of the failed revolutions of that year, and in 1849 he first visited and began surveying the White Mountains, when he was living and lecturing in Cambridge. Guyot repeatedly visited the White Mountains in the course of his research. He used a highly sensitive hypsometer, a device that depends upon the measurement of the boiling point of water, rather than a barometer for determining altitudes. He and Bond were the only early cartographers of the White Mountains to have any familiarity with the Alps, or, for that matter, any mountains beyond the American east.

Click here to read more about the 'Comparative view of the heights of the principal mountains in the world' map

The first graph of the relative heights of the world’s mountains appeared in 1786, but it and the ones that followed were more akin to bar charts than to artistic representations of mountains. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) felt that such graphs wanted improvement, and in 1813 he published his version, with the mountains of the western hemisphere thoughtfully juxtaposed against each other on the left, and those of the eastern hemisphere similarly arranged on the right. His design was the model for what became a very popular illustration through the nineteenth century, with countless versions appearing in atlases and printed on their own.

The example here, printed in Boston in 1820, is rare and perhaps only the second or third to follow Goethe’s design. In the key running down the left side, Mount Washington is no. 36, but because of an error, there are actually two mountains labeled “36” in the chart. This is the third (and fourth) appearance of Mount Washington on a map, because a chart of the comparative heights of the world’s mountains, on the pre-Goethe design, was published in London in 1817. Because this map was printed in Boston, it gives special attention to the mountains of the Northeast, and so includes the Blue Hills, barely noticeable at the bottom.

Note the tiny figure high up on the slope of Mount Chimborazo, on the left, then believed to be the highest peak in the western hemisphere. This represents Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859), who, in climbing that mountain to within 1000 feet of the summit in 1802 had reached what then was the highest elevation attained by a Westerner.

Note also on the right the elevation assigned to the summit of Dhaulagiri (meaning “White Mountain”), in the Himalayas, then the tallest known mountain in the world. The chart has text giving the precise source of this figure, which had been calculated by British surveyors a few years before, and is astonishingly close to the present value, though this is partly just luck, given that the definition of sea level has changed over the last 200 years.

Click here to read more about Pickering's 'Map of the White Mountains'

William H. Pickering (1858-1938) was an astronomer and the younger brother of Edward C. Pickering, who founded the Appalachian Mountain Club (AMC) in 1876. He was active for many years in the AMC, serving variously as “Councillor for Improvements” and later president. He issued this map in 1882 in two publications: in the June 1882 issue of Appalachia, the quarterly journal of the AMC, and in a handbook entitled Walking Guide to the Mt. Washington Range. This handbook was the first guide written specifically for the hiker in the White Mountains, as distinct from the tourists, who might hire guides to lead them up the mountains. This map, correspondingly, may be considered the first hiking map of the White Mountains.

Note the contours, at the broad interval of 500 feet. Pickering wrote that “the observations on which this map is founded have been gradually accumulating since the summer of 1876, and are of four kinds: those made with the telescope, barometer, camera [lucida as well as photographic], and eye.” He uses a specialized nomenclature for mountains that had been devised by the AMC in one of its first meetings, in April 1876. In this system, the entire state of New Hampshire was divided into 26 regions with letter designations, and then major peaks were identified alphabetically within numbered areas inside each region, with subsidiary designations for subsidiary peaks. In this system, Mt. Washington is peak F6.1, being the highest peak in area 6 of New Hampshire region F. The horizontal scale is given in kilometers as well as miles. Early AMC publications sometimes used the metric system in addition to English measure, perhaps because so many founding members were scientists.

Cutter’s later AMC map of the Presidential Range, which has been continually issued since 1907, credited Pickering’s map as a source of information into its 1960 edition.