U-M purchases rare map of Northwest Territory

December 5, 2006
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ANN ARBOR—He learned surveying at an early age, became a sailor, clockmaker, brass founder, maker of potash, button maker, silversmith, gunsmith, inventor of steamships, was captured by Indians and still had time in his leisure to produce a copper-engraved map “from scratch.”

John Fitch (1743-1798) produced a map of the Northwest Territory, a “road map” of the upper Middle West. One of these handmade, privately printed maps now resides at the University of Michigan’s Clements Library.

While there are only six or seven copies of Fitch’s map identified, all have been in the hands of public institutions on the East Coast. Now a copy of John Fitch’s ” Map of the North West Parts of the United States of America (1785)” has found a permanent home in “the West” portrayed by the map itself” in one of the six states that eventually were carved out of the Northwest Territory: Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin and Minnesota.

“The Fitch map has every quality that goes into making a ‘headline’ sale item at an auction,” said Philip Mason, chairman of the Clements Library Associates, the organization that bid on and bought the map for the library. “It is of the greatest importance from a documentary and research point of view.”

This historic and geographically important document, produced by a somewhat enigmatic and ill-fated American genius, engraved by its author on a copper plate of his own making, printed on a cider press and hand colored by the wife of a local farmer, includes manuscript additions of importance that exist on no other copy of the map.

These additions provide detail on Native American history and settlement and on natural resources such as deposits of coal. Scholars will undoubtedly study the handwriting of these notes, compare them with existing examples and determine if they were made by Fitch himself, the first owner of the map or perhaps by Benjamin Franklin or some other luminary of Philadelphia of the 1780s.

Fitch is remembered among historians as the inventor of the first steamboats. Between 1787 and 1796, he built four successful vessels, but lacked the capital and skill as a businessman to profit from these ventures. Fitch committed suicide at 55 in a public tavern in Bardstown, Kentucky.

The Fitch map of 1785 joins the Clements Library’s collection of original maps of this period” a collection unsurpassed at any American Library, complemented by photocopies and reproductions of maps not present in the collection in original form.

 

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