Practical Knowledge and the New Republic

Perhaps what is most visually striking about Osgood Carleton’s recently rediscovered 1795 map of Boston is its sheer size. At approximately seven feet by six and a half feet, this wall map dwarfs many other Boston maps of the late eighteenth century, including Carleton’s own 1797 work, which until recently was considered the largest Boston map from this period known to be extant in a collection. Though the original map has faded and worn considerably over time, a close inspection of this capacious work reveals considerable subtleties that depict a vision of Boston well suited to the kind of life, animated by practical sciences and skills, that Carleton led.

Osgood Carleton was born to a New England farming family in 1742 and had little schooling. At age 16, he began military service in Nova Scotia during the Seven Years’ War, and he later served in the Continental Army during the American Revolution. While he was born in New Hampshire and appears to have lived for a time in Haverhill, Massachusetts and in Maine, it was in Boston that Carleton made his mark and built the bulk of his career. Armed with mathematical skills presumably gained during his military service, Carleton earned his living putting these skills to practical use: he became a surveyor, a contributor to the ubiquitous almanacs of the era, and the leading cartographer in Massachusetts during his lifetime.

Among Carleton’s signature achievements of the 1790s was his role in the creation of new maps of and for the state of Massachusetts. In 1794 the Massachusetts General Court expressed an interest in the production of a new, accurate map of the state, which would serve a number of practical purposes and promote the state’s economic growth and prosperity. Carleton was among those who suggested that the Commonwealth require each municipality to survey its territory and submit accurate town plans to state authorities. Once this work was completed, Carleton produced a map of the entire territory of Massachusetts around 1795, based on the plans submitted by the towns.

Like many eighteenth-century maps, Carleton’s Massachusetts map features ornamentation in the form of a sizeable artistic cartouche. Even the ornamentation, however, points toward the practical, economic nature of the map; the illustrations feature maritime implements, symbols of the centrality of both trade and fishing to the Massachusetts economy. Atop the cartouche, the map pictures the seal of the Commonwealth, featuring an American Indian figure holding a bow and an arrow pointing downward, symbolizing peace. (The irony of the peacefulness and prosperity of the state resting on a history of colonial violence toward Native peoples has not prevented the seal from remaining largely the same to this day, though an ongoing conversation has prompted the possibility of a redesign.) The American Indian iconography of the seal dates to 1629, when King Charles I granted the Massachusetts colonial charter.

The explicitly economic and practical nature of the map is revealed by the cartographic symbols in its key. In addition to roads, courthouses, and meeting houses, the map features sites that include a variety of mills (grist, saw, paper, fulling), iron works, iron ore deposits, furnaces, woolen manufactories, and potash works. Along the coast and offshore, the map also includes features of importance to the shipping and fishing industries, like harbors, exposed rocks, shipping channels, and rips. The economic and political prominence of Boston is evident in the mileage markings, which illustrate distances of the state’s municipalities from both county towns and the capital.

A circa 1798 version of Carleton’s map, at roughly three feet by four feet, is slightly larger than the 1795 Massachusetts map, and this later version adds significant hand coloring.

While the earlier rendering used color only to mark county borders, the latter adds color to the outline of the coast, some inland water bodies, mountain ranges, meeting houses, courthouses, and grist mills. The color added to these practical features on the map make it somewhat easier to read than the original version. Color was also included in the compass rose and the decorative elements of the map’s cartouche in the 1798 map, making it much more eye-catching.

Despite the ambition of his efforts to create a comprehensive map of the state, Carleton’s original versions of the Massachusetts map were rejected by state authorities. The General Court argued that John Norman, the engraver of the maps, had not sufficiently polished his engraving plates, resulting in substandard prints. When Norman failed to make the necessary changes in a timely fashion, Carleton redrew the map, which was engraved this time by Joseph Callendar and Samuel Hill.

The resulting 1801 map was accepted by state authorities, and it contained some significant differences from the previous Carleton-Norman maps. Interestingly, the map key to the 1801 version contains fewer references to sites of economic activity such as mills, and more features related to physical geography, such as ponds, streams, and the like. The cartouche has also changed; symbols related to maritime commerce remain, but images of agricultural labor have been added, and the state seal has been removed. An image of a Native person remains, however, this time in a more lifelike rendering, larger in size, and still holding the bow and downward pointing arrow. And, perhaps in a nod to the symbols of the newly formed Republic, the fleur-de-lis indicating north on the previous maps has been replaced by a somewhat crudely drawn bird, almost certainly meant to represent an eagle.

Carleton did not only map the state of Massachusetts as we know it today. He was also the first to produce a highly detailed map of its northern outpost, then called the District of Maine. Before it achieved statehood in 1820, Maine was a part of Massachusetts Bay Colony and then the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Carleton’s 1798 map of Maine is a notable achievement for its level of detail alone, especially along the coastline.

The seemingly countless peninsulas and thousands of islands along the Maine coast present a formidable cartographic challenge. Relatively free of ornamentation, the District of Maine map strikes the viewer as a largely practical document, providing information desired by the Massachusetts authorities of the era. It features towns, roads, land grants, meeting houses, boundary lines, and, like Carleton’s other Massachusetts maps, mileage distances to Boston, the economic and political center of the Commonwealth.

The conspicuous red border lines on Carleton’s Maine map also appear to echo John Mitchell’s landmark 1755 map of North America. The Mitchell map contained lines representing treaty agreements, and it was famously at the center of the treaty negotiations that concluded the American Revolutionary War. In the negotiations, the Mitchell map was annotated with red lines demarcating the newly independent United States, and a copy of the Mitchell “red line” map was given to King George III. Like the Mitchell map, Carleton’s District of Maine map marks the border between the United States and British territory in red; interestingly, however, Carleton’s map also marks the border between Maine and New Hampshire and the border between York and Cumberland Counties in the same color. It is unclear whether Carleton included the red markings or they were added to this copy of the map at a later time.

In addition to the tangible remnants of Carleton’s career in the form of these maps, he also left a legacy in his role as a teacher of young men in the City of Boston. Published in a ciphering book from 1791, this advertisement lists Carleton’s courses of instruction, which he offered on an array of practical mathematical skills from navigation to surveying and mensuration to gunnery, bookkeeping, and the projection of spheres and maps.

Given Boston’s role as a key port city, it is perhaps not surprising that the most prominent word featuring the largest type on the advertisement is “Navigation,” and the text of the advertisement is preceded by an illustration of a three-masted sailing ship. But many of the skills Carleton was equipped to teach were in demand, as Boston needed men (professional training being highly gender restricted at this time) equipped with the technical skills required to build a rapidly growing and increasingly globally-connected city. Because the curriculum of the public schools of the time typically omitted practical mathematical applications—focusing instead on language skills, Latin, and arithmetic—Carleton’s ambitions as a teacher found purchase. With approval from the Boston Board of Selectmen, Carleton set up a school at Oliver’s Dock on the Boston waterfront in 1787.

Carleton was a cartographer and teacher of considerable skill and accomplishment who has long been recognized as an important historical figure. However, his body of surviving work received a surprising addition in 2021. In that year the Leventhal Map & Education Center at the Boston Public Library received Carleton’s unusually large 1795 Boston manuscript map as a gift from the Massachusetts Charitable Mechanic Association (MCMA). The most likely provenance history of this map is that it was discarded by a City office in the middle of the twentieth century—perhaps during the construction of the new City Hall in the 1960s—and rescued by a contractor before arriving at the conference room of the MCMA. MCMA, in turn, gifted the map to the the Leventhal Center, bringing the map full circle back to the people of the City of Boston. (By coincidence, the MCMA was founded in 1795, the same year that the map was produced.)

Upon examining this map, the viewer’s eye is most immediately drawn to the upper left and lower right quadrants of this substantial work of cartographic art and science. The former contains a large, colorful 32-point compass rose and familiar fleur-de-lis indicating north while the latter is dominated by a cartouche containing the title, dedication, year, and name of the cartographer.

These two prominent features may initially draw attention away from Carleton’s depiction of the city itself, faded as it is by the passage of time. But a closer inspection reveals the map’s considerable subtleties. Several locations represented on the map point to the developing political power of the new state of Massachusetts, to aspects of Boston’s racial history, and to the city’s significance as a place of labor and commerce in the new republic. Two illustrations surrounding the text of the cartouche, now somewhat difficult to discern due to the effects of time and damage, emphasize the latter two points, with scenes depicting agriculture and shipping.

Taken together, these elements of Carleton’s map project an image of a city cut free from British rule and bustling with commercial activity. As a man of common rank who dedicated his life and labor to the pursuit and teaching of applied sciences and mathematics, Osgood Carleton produced a map of Boston that reflects the particular kind of life he led.

Interestingly, Oliver’s Dock, the location of Carleton’s school, appears on this map but is not marked. The word “dock” in this case refers to the common British usage, meaning a partially-enclosed area of water next to a wharf, used for loading and unloading ships (rather than a wooden structure that protrudes into the water, for example, which is common in American usage today). It is unclear why Carleton would not have marked Oliver’s Dock, which is also omitted from several other Boston maps of the same era. Carleton’s depictions tend to focus on wharf structures on the waterfront, rather than the docks themselves. But Oliver’s Dock does appear on some pre-Revolutionary maps, including John Bonner’s maps of the 1720s, with which Carleton would have been familiar. The dock was named for the wealthy and politically-connected Oliver family, who were, notably, loyalists—Andrew Oliver was hanged in effigy for his role as the official charged with enforcing the infamous Stamp Act. While we will never know the cartographer’s intention, that Carleton chose to omit the loyalist name connected to this familiar waterside locale seems apt.

That the waterfront played a key role in Boston’s eighteenth-century life is both unsurprising and clearly evident on Carleton’s map. At this time, many of Boston’s modern neighborhoods were still water, consisting mostly of tidal marshes not yet filled in by major land expansion projects of the nineteenth century. The map shows a smaller (by current standards) eighteenth-century footprint of the city covered, porcupine-like, by wharfs jutting from the northern and eastern coastlines. The seafaring prominence of the city is also illustrated by the artwork to the right side of the cartouche. Though the bottom-right section of the map has sustained damage, it appears that a maritime scene accompanied the cartouche text frame on its right side, while an agricultural scene borders it to the left.

Over the course of the eighteenth century, the elaborate artistic embellishments common on earlier North American maps began to wane, as practical functionality began to replace fanciful ornamentation. But illustrations remained on many, including Carleton’s own aforementioned maps of Massachusetts. Carleton’s 1795 Boston map, however, contains two modest depictions of labor, agricultural and maritime, and unlike his Massachusetts maps, features no clear reference to indigenous people. By 1795, the settler power structure of Boston was busy creating a new nation, having long since appropriated the land from indigenous people and more recently broken free from the British Empire. The artwork on Carleton’s map reflects his role as a man of practical sciences engaged in practical work.

Other details of the Boston map also point to locations of maritime and agricultural labor in the city. The commercial work of shipping, so clearly referenced not only in the cartouche but in the city’s many wharves, was aided by labor farther inland. In the southwestern portion of the area marked “Common,” on the western extreme of the map, Carleton marks the ropewalks situated there.

In 1794, these newer ropewalks replaced those that had previously burned elsewhere in the city. The rope-making business supplied the commercial and naval ships of Boston, the city’s seafaring economy ensuring a significant demand. Just to the east of the ropewalks is an unmarked street, today’s Charles Street, separating the ropewalks from the large expanse of Boston Common. Here too, as the Common’s name suggests, Bostonians engaged in labor. Common lands in Europe were historically often used as pastureland, and the practice continued in the early colonial settlement of Boston. By 1795 restrictions on numbers of cattle that could be grazed on the Common were in place, but the practice would continue there until a total ban was enacted in 1830. The cattle ban was part of a gradual transformation of these spaces from locations of work to ones of leisure. The ropewalk area to the west of Charles Street is now the Public Garden, while the Boston Common itself has become a public park.

Details of Carleton’s map portray not only developing aspects of the economic life of city, but political change as well. On the north side of Beacon Street and the Boston Common Carleton has marked “State Land,” which was recently acquired from its former owner, Massachusetts Governor John Hancock.

Carleton’s rectangle with the words “New State house” mark the spot where construction was underway in the year of the map’s publishing. On July 4, 1795, Paul Revere oversaw the laying of the new State House cornerstone, accompanied by a time capsule ceremoniously embedded by Revere, Samuel Adams, and Revolutionary War Colonel William Scollay. The much smaller (old) State House, still standing today, is visible and marked on Carleton’s map at the junction of State Street and Corn-Hill (today’s Washington Street).

The new structure would be constructed on a much more imposing scale, perched on Beacon Hill, and evoking architectural cues from stately British buildings in London. The scale, location, and grand dome of the new State House embody the confidence and optimism of the state and its capital in 1795.

While numerous details of Carleton’s map point to the prosperity, growth, and new independence of the white power structure of Boston, omissions also help tell the story of Carleton’s experience of the city. Just to the northwest of the New State House on Carleton’s map is May Street, now called Myrtle Street. Just south of May street is the location of what is now the oldest remaining home on Beacon Hill, at 5 Pinckney Street, unmarked on the map. The house at 5 Pinckney Street was built by two free black men, George Middleton and Louis Glapion, from 1786 to 1787. Middleton was a horse breaker and active member of several community organizations, and he served in a black militia known as The Bucks of America during the Revolutionary War. Less is known about Glapion, but he was a hairdresser and may have been born in the West Indies. What is now known as the Middleton House is currently a site on the Boston Black Heritage Trail and is a private residence. Pinckney Street’s absence from Carleton’s map may be explained by the fact that it was little more than an alley at the time, which contained stables serving the large houses of the wealthy on the southern slope of Beacon Hill. Yet its absence from Carleton’s map, despite being home to one of Boston’s most prominent black residents, illustrates the ways in which the map highlights the racial hierarchy of Boston society.

A major landmark connected to fortunes made from black labor, however, is visible on the map just to the north of State Street under the heading “Market.” Today a major tourist attraction, “Fanuel Hall,” as Carleton renders it, was a center of commerce and politics in eighteenth-century Boston.

Completed in 1742, the building became a centralized marketplace and important meeting hall, funded by wealthy merchant Peter Faneuil (the structure is today known as “Faneuil Hall”). Its key role in providing meeting space for protests and political gatherings leading up to the Revolution gave it the nickname “the Cradle of Liberty,” and it continued to serve as a scene of political activity into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Its nickname is not without irony, however; Faneuil was a slaveholder, and his fortunes were connected to both the slave trade and slave labor on plantations. While the presence and work of black men like Middleton does not show up on Carleton’s map, an international, maritime, and commercial economy tied to the labor of enslaved black people is evident.

Boston’s maritime economy of 1795 was in some ways consistent with the city’s Atlantic orientation since the previous century. Yet Boston also experienced significant change in the wake of the revolution. Following the eleven-month siege of Boston and destruction caused by the occupying British Army, the city rebuilt, grew, and broadened its horizons. No longer bound by the restrictive British Navigation Acts, Boston merchants (minus exiled loyalists) expanded their trade networks to the Francophone world and beyond. Carleton’s fascinating map reveals much of the dynamic story of 1795 Boston, perhaps even serving as a kind of birth certificate for the newly-independent political entity it had become. And the florid prose of Carleton’s dedication of the map to the select-men of the city, “ever distinguished for their zeal for the good of their constituents” indicates his eagerness to ingratiate himself to the new power structure of independent Boston.

Osgood Carleton’s 1795 map of Boston is in many ways a utilitarian document. With little ornamentation, it maps a city of commerce, labor, and growing independent political power in the new republic. In this way, it reflects the kind of life, built upon practical knowledge and work, that Carleton lived. At the same time, some of its details and omissions gesture toward class, racial, and political divides that marked late eighteenth-century Boston. As J.B. Harley observes, a map’s blank spaces, omissions, and silences can speak loudly---and one blank space on Carleton’s map seems perhaps most telling of all, if in a somewhat different manner from the other cartographic absences. Above the text frame in Carleton’s cartouche is an empty oval shape. On other seventeenth and eighteenth-century British and North American maps, similar shapes often contain a number of types of ornamentation, normally connected to power or prestige: the coat of arms of the British monarch, a portrait of a powerful nobleman, or other symbols of high authority. No evidence survives to tell us why Carleton left the oval on his imposing map of Boston blank. But in 1795, Boston was a key city in the new republic. There were no more nobles or kings, and the city was building a culture based on republican ideals. Perhaps Carleton’s map, simple in ornamentation, required no further symbolism than the scenes of labor that accompanied the cartouche on this fascinating map.

Further Reading

David Bosse, “Osgood Carleton: Mathematical Practitioner of Boston,” Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, Third Series, Vol. 107 (1995), pp. 141-164.

Matthew H. Edney, “The Mitchell Map, 1755-82: An Irony of Empire.”

J.B. Harley, “Maps, Knowledge, and Power,” in The New Nature of Maps: Essays in the History of Cartography, Paul Laxton, ed. (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001)

Andrew Liaupsin, “Osgood Carleton,” American Revolutionary Geographies Online.

Garrett Dash Nelson, “Surveying all of Massachusetts in the town plans collections,” Leventhal Map and Education Center, August 25, 2022.

About the author

John W. Mackey is a Master Lecturer of Social Sciences in the College of General Studies at Boston University and holds a PhD in modern history from Boston College. He teaches courses on United States Foreign Policy and comparative revolutions in Russia, China, and Iran. His other academic interests include modern British, Irish, and American politics, European intellectual history, colonial and post-colonial history, and the history of cartography. He is a contributing author of The Modernization of the Western World: A Society Transformed (Routledge, 2018) and his articles and reviews have appeared in The Conversation, Salon, Cognoscenti, We’re History, The Journal of British Studies, the Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, and The Globe Post. He was awarded a Map Fellowship by the MacLean Collection in 2018 and received awards for outstanding teaching at Boston University (2016), Harvard University (2004) and Boston College (1997).