Leavitt's Map with Views of the White Mountains, New Hampshire
- Title:
- Leavitt's Map with Views of the White Mountains, New Hampshire
- Alternate Title:
- Leavitt's Map with Views of the White Mountains
- Collection:
- Persuasive Maps: PJ Mode Collection
- Creator:
- Leavitt, Franklin
- Other Creators:
- Victor Leavitt, publisher
- Date:
- 1888
- Posted Date:
- 2024-04-25
- ID Number:
- 2393.01
- File Name:
- PJM_2393_01Adj.jpg
- Style/Period:
- 1870 - 1899
- Subject:
- Advertising & Promotion
Pictorial
Unusual Graphics/Text - Measurement:
- 51 x 77 (centimeters, height x width)
- Notes:
- This promotional tourist map of the White Mountains of New Hampshire by Franklin Leavitt is rare example of 19th-century American cartographic folk art. This is the last in a series of six such maps Leavitt published over a period of 36 years and sold in train stations, hotels and inns throughout the region. See generally Tatham 1991.
Leavitt was born and spent virtually his entire life in the White Mountains. He began work at age 12 or 13 at the Crawford Notch House shown on the map, and among other things helped build the first bridle path to the summit of Mt. Washington and an alternative route for carriages (now the auto road). “Unschooled,” “roughhewn” and “uncouth, to say the least,” he made his living not only as a laborer, but as a farmer, hunter, woodsman and mountain guide. His mapmaking (and later his poetry) was more of an “avocation.” Tatham 110-11.
In 1852, rail lines convenient to the mountains were nearing completion, and guest houses were opening. Leavitt drew “a unique map of the region, not a travel map but a memento of the mountains and of Levitt the guide,” and had it produced by Boston’s leading lithographer, John Bufford. Ibid. 112. For the next three decades, as sales exhausted supplies of the map and the region changed, Leavitt produced and marketed five later versions. This is the final, 1882, version (copyrighted the previous year but delayed in production). By this time, Leavitt had transferred ownership of the map to his son Victor, who is listed as the publisher. This is the second state, with the “2” in the original 1882 title date altered to an “8.”
This map is in many ways the most elaborate of Leavitt’s six versions. While it incorporates artistic elements from earlier maps, it adds a number of the latest developments in transportation and accommodations for visitors to the region. Train engines puff smoke and pull passenger cars along each rail line. Roads are filled with horse-drawn carriages. While Leavitt’s first map of 1852 had shown large elevations of only two guest houses, literally dozens are illustrated and named in this map - no doubt places where Leavitt sold (or hoped to sell) his work. Views of waterfalls fill the four corners. A small inset of rail connections from Boston is at the lower right, and tables of distance at the top left.
Just above the center of the map, in Crawford (White Mountain) Notch, the “Willey Family” are shown in black, fleeing from the “Willey House,” whose caption is framed in black. This records a real-life tragedy that occurred on August 28, 1826, during a torrential rainstorm. As a massive landslide of rocks and mud thundered down the mountain, the family of two adults and five children, with two hired men, fled from their small inn to a shelter they had prepared nearby against the danger of such an event. But the landslide ironically diverted away from the house and engulfed the shelter, killing them all. Tatham 107-08.
In many ways, the map is focused on the set of large illustrations at the center: “Harry Crawford shooting a lynx” (which looks unmistakably like a rabbit); “Col. Whipple and the Moose” (apparently sitting on the animal’s antlers!); “Old Crawford killing a bear”; “Old Gib killing a bear”; and “Tom Miller killing the bear.” These images evoke well-documented names of early White Mountain settlers known to Leavitt (the Crawford family and Colonel Whipple), as well as the not-so-well-documented legends of dealing with bears and other wildlife in the early days. While I can find no reference to “Tom Miller” killing a bear, the image corresponds exactly to reports of one Samuel Knight of nearby Warren (just to the right of the image). Knight was suddenly attacked by a bear, “desperately freed his right arm, pulled out his knife, pried it open with his teeth, and stabbed the bear in the side, piercing the bear’s heart.” Johnson 2006, 43.
The maps produced by the “unschooled” Leavitt are notoriously unpredictable in scale, orientation and choice of content. “Inclusion of a mountain apparently depended on its significance to him and his work as a guide.” “The Connecticut River runs not only north and south, as it should, but east and west, as it should not.” On Leavitt’s maps, “rivers and roads wind where they make design sense rather than where they would accord with geographical fact” so he could “express his ideas about . . . the human dramas of the mountains.” Tatham 112, 114-15, 121. While these maps may have been “reasonably helpful to casual visitors and desirable as a souvenir,” in Michael Buehler’s phrase, they were, “useless or even dangerous to anyone using it as a guide to the back country.” https://bostonraremaps.com/inventory/franklin-leavitt-white-mountains/, accessed February 16, 2019. But regardless of Leavitt’s shortcomings as a cartographer, his folk art speaks to us more than a century after his death.
Cornell University Library is pleased to present this digital collection of Persuasive Maps, the originals of which have been collected and described by the private collector PJ Mode. The descriptive information in the “Collector’s Notes” has been supplied by Mr. Mode and does not necessarily reflect the views of Cornell University. - Format:
- Image
- Rights:
- For important information about copyright and use, see http://persuasivemaps.library.cornell.edu/copyright.