Rea and Price 1849 Map

I recently ran across something on the interwebs that was just too cool not to pass along -- at least in my own odd sense of the word "cool". A while back, I did a post about the 1868 Beers map, which is probably the historical map I use the most in my research. Besides the fact that it's a very fine map (and colorful, too!), one of the reasons I use it so much is the simple fact that I have all of it in one place. For all the other maps, I only had various bits and pieces of them culled from different places -- some totalling more or less the entire area, some with gaps. Now, however, I've found a full version of my second favorite map, the 1849 Rea and Price map.

I don't know when they put it up, but sometime recently the New Castle Community History and Archaeology Program  (NC-CHAP) posted a full-sized, high resolution, zoomable version of the map. You can find this version here. To be honest, since even the best copies I had seen of the map were in black and white, I didn't even know that the original was in color. It's actually a beautiful map, in its own way.

Like the 1868 Beers map, this one also shows the locations of the major landowners' houses, which is certainly the most useful feature of these maps. Additionally, it shows other points of interest, like schools, churches, mills, inns, and even a few stores. And of course, this one is a generation earlier than the Beers map. The version on the NC-CHAP site is fabulous in that it's complete (the whole county), a high resolution scan, and zoomable.

Besides showing all the hundreds of New Castle County, the map also has an inset of Wilmington. One interesting note about the Wilmington inset ties in with a point raised recently in comments about the NCC Bus Route Map. If you look on the west side of the city, there is a little section called Washington Village that sits on the south side of Delaware Avenue. This was a proposed housing tract that was talked about for years, but ultimately never built. Including it on this map seems to have been a bit of wishful thinking.

All in all, I don't really have much else to say about the map, except that this is a fantastic version of the oldest detailed map of MCH (there's an 1820 map that I've seen, but it contains only a fraction of the information of this one). My gratitude goes to NC-CHAP for making this map available -- I've already wasted spent lots of time wandering through it. And if you're interested in any aspect of the history of Old New Castle, check out their site. There's a lot good stuff there.



Additional Facts and Related Thoughts:

• I think "zoomable" is now my new favorite word
• The red squares around the schools were done by NC-CHAP, and were not part of the original map.
• If you look in the upper righthand corner of the map, there's a table with demographic information broken down by hundred, as well as a key to some of the abbreviations used on the map.