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Map of the Town of Walpole, Mass. Formerly a Part of Dedham. Drawn from Actual Survey… This Plan was made in Conformity to a Law of the State, and under the Direction of the Town.
Boston: Pendleton’s Lithog., 1832. Lithograph, 27.375” x 19” plus margins. CONDITION: Good, light creasing to upper and lower portions, faint dampstains. A handsome lithographic map of Walpole, Mass., based on a survey executed in accordance with state law for the purpose of compiling a more accurate map of the state. Showing the entirety of Walpole—a total of 12,638 acres—this map reaches from the town of Dover in the north to Foxborough in the south, and from Wrentham in the west to Dedham in the east. It includes such details as meadows, forests, roads, bodies of water, mills, churches, schools, factories, and many homes, with property owners identified, some of whom are female (such as Mrs. Copps and Mrs. Messenger). Text at bottom-right notes that the town contains the following manufacturing establishments: six cotton factories, three satinet factories, one linen factory, two triphammer shops for the manufacture of hoes, and one grist mill. The roads and ponds comprise a total of 289 acres. Relief is shown by hachure. Settled in May of 1724 and incorporated in December of 1724, Walpole, Norfolk County, Mass. is located some twenty-five miles south of Boston. The town began to grow after the Revolutionary War. Several mills were built, largely at the falls on the Neponset River. Over the years, these mills grew, mainly manufacturing products such as cotton, lumber, and paper. Censuses recorded 1326 inhabitants in 1820 and 1442 residents in 1830. Surveyor Elijah Hewins (?–1857) was a lifelong resident of Sharon, Mass. and served as a deacon in the local Baptist church. In addition to his map of Walpole, Hewins also compiled A Map of the Town of Sharon, Mass: formerly a part of Stoughton (Boston, 1831), also “made in conformity to a law of the state.” The 1832 manuscript survey for the present map, which is entitled Plan of Walpole made by Elijah Hewins, is held by the Massachusetts State Archives. By 1829 Osgood Carleton’s maps of Massachusetts were obsolete, and so in 1829 and 1830 the state legislature commissioned Simeon Borden to produce a new state map of the state. The resulting work, Topographical Map of Massachusetts (Boston, 1844), was the first map of any state to be based on triangulation from geodetically-controlled points. Each town and city in Massachusetts was required to make a town plan based on a survey no more than five years old, to be submitted to the state secretary’s office. Such plans, to be drawn on a scale of 100 rods to the inch, were to include rivers, waterways, public and private roads, places of public worship, courthouses, other public buildings, distance from town center to county shire town and to Boston, bridges and ferries, falls, ponds, shores, harbors, islands, mountains and hills, mills and manufactories, mines, iron works, meadows, and woodlands. One of the main difficulties the project faced was the uneven quality of the town surveys. The quality of quite a few, however, was quite good and many were published by Pendleton’s Lithography of Boston. Operating from 1825 to 1836, Pendleton’s was founded by brothers William Pendleton (1795–1879) and John Pendleton (1798–1866) and located at Harvard Place. The city’s first shop of its kind, Pendleton’s was also one of the finest lithographers of its era. Prior to the formation of the firm, William had founded Senefelder Lithographic Co. in 1825 with Abel Bowen. A range of artists—some of whom would become quite prominent—learned the art of lithography while working at Pendleton’s, including Fitz Henry Lane, John H. Bufford, Seth Cheney, Nathaniel Currier, Thomas Edwards, B. F. Nutting, George L. Brown, Benjamin Champney, Alexander Jackson Davis, David Claypoole Johnston, Robert Cooke, William Rimmer, and John W. A. Scott. These artists created a variety of materials: maps, plans, portraits, fashion plates, topographical views, sheet-music covers, advertisements, and historical prints. In 1826, the brothers won a silver medal for the “Best Specimen of Lithography” at the annual exhibition of the Franklin Institute, Philadelphia. OCLC records only one copy, at the State Library of Massachusetts. REFERENCES: Buehler, Michael. “Mapping Massachusetts: A century of innovation in cartography” (2019) at Boston Rare Maps online; Last, Jay. The Color Explosion: Nineteenth-Century American Lithography (Santa Ana, CA, 2005), pp. 120–121; Pierce, Sally and Catharina Slautterback. Boston Lithography, 1825–1880 (Boston, 1991), pp. 146–147, 175; “Plan of Walpole made by Elijah Hewins, dated December, 1832” at Digital Commonwealth Massachusetts Collections Online.
Item #6381
Price: $2,750.00