Shaping the Territory

William Wood's flyleaf map for New Englands Prospect (London, 1634) was the first map to describe the coastline from Narragansett Bay to New Hampshire in some detail. By giving shape to the territory, it served practical purposes; though it did not allow precise navigation, it provided a semblance of location, so that European newcomers could obtain some idea of where they were. The map also shaped the territory figuratively. Despite Wood's clear description of dispersed agricultural settlement, the map has forever linked in historians' minds particular points-the location of meetinghouses-with surrounding spacestowns and villages on the New England landscape. The result has been a fundamental misunderstanding of colonial historical geography. We still cling to the notion that early New Englanders lived in nucleated villages.' And we do so, even as methods of survey and cartographic representation prove otherwise, thanks to dramatic improvements in their descriptive techniques over the passing centuries. By the middle of the eighteenth century, American surveyors such as George Washington mapped with much improved scientific accuracy, compared to Wood's generation. Enterprising Virginians interested in inland resources pondered these maps to determine the most efficient routes to the Ohio Country. They quickly decided that the town of Alexandria, perched on the Potomac River, offered a shorter route, by water and with a few comparatively easy portages, to the mouth of the Cuyahoga River at Lake Erie, site of present-day Cleveland, than did any other eastern seaboard city.2 Surely, they reasoned, Alexandria would rise into the great entrep6t of the eastern seaboard. Speculators were destined to disappointment; rival cities-New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore-captured the western trade thanks to transportation improvements that overcame the disadvantage of location. Nonetheless

Political science · American Environmental and Regional History · American History and Culture · Archaeology and Natural History