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A Survey of the Roads of the United States of America, 1789

1961; The MIT Press; Volume: 34; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/362957

1937-2213

George R. Taylor, Christopher Colles, Walter W. Ristow,

American Environmental and Regional History

When the Constitution of the United States went into effect, in 1789, and the new Postmaster General began the organization of a national postal system, he had at his disposal no published map of the roads of the United States. One can imagine the pleasure with which he received, early in the following year, a proposal for such a map from an experienced and public-spirited engineer named Christopher Colles. Colles, in a petition, asked for public assistance to permit continued publication of a series of hand-size sheets that he had begun under the title A of the Roads of the United States of America. Although the Postmaster General supported Colles' request, Congress did not provide money, and apparently on this account the map series was never completed. However, Colles' own funds and those of private subscribers made possible the production of eighty-three sheets for general sale, a pioneer monument of American commercial route mapping. The sheets have now been reproduced in facsimile and published in a handsome book, together with a background monograph by Walter W. Ristow of the Library of Congress. The Survey sheets, keyed to an index map, individually bear two or three strip maps drawn to the scale of i4 inches to the mile. The bulk of the strip maps, taken together, represent a north-south stem connecting Albany, New York, and Yorktown, Virginia. The road as mapped approximates today's U. S. Highway 9 from Albany to New York City, State Highway 27 across New Jersey, U. S. Highway 13 from the New Jersey border at Trenton to Wilmington, Delaware, and U. S. Highway 40 from Wilmington to Baltimore. Along paths not closely related to modern major highways, the road led from Baltimore to the Potomac River at Georgetown, thence to Alexandria, and by way of Fredericksburg and Williamsburg to Yorktown. The few other roads shown by Colles were all attached to this via priiicipia. Three of them, in New York, New Jersey, and Virginia respectively, were simply short alternate routes; a fourth led ninety miles southeastward from Poughkeepsie, on the Albany-New York City road, to Stratford, Connecticut, and back from Stratford along the shore of Long Island Sound to the main route. The length of roadways represented totaled about one-third of an estimated three thousand miles that Colles originally had hoped to map. Colles' Survey allows a visit to countrysides otherwise hardly knowable today for want of comparable documentation. It records the little-improved wanderings of an interstate thoroughfare whose lack of bridges alone reflects the small amount of capital available for promotion of an exchange economy at the outset of the federal era. It locates the roadside installations of a rural, coastal-plain society whose principal service centers were taverns, smithies, and churches, whose cultivated lands were far less extensive than its forests, whose developed mineral sites were practically confined to minor iron deposits, and whose manufacturing stood generally at the level of the grist mill. Of special value are the eight ographers are sometimes accused of dealing w th insignificant topics. Gottmann ed fear no such accusation. While others ave been chanting the Requiem of Regional ography, he has produced a regional geography of such scope and quality as to cast seris doubt on this demise.-RAYMOND E. MURPHY 454