Parkersburg, West Virginia, 1861 – Antique Map Print
(Originally scanned by the Library of Congress. Each image is professionally and digitally cleaned of artifacts such as color bars and extra borders prior to printing.)
Description
This rare antique map captures Parkersburg, West Virginia, 1861 in remarkable detail. The original is held by the Library of Congress, so what you hang is a true record of its time.
Library of Congress record: Parkersburg, West Virginia 1899
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Parkersburg, West Virginia, 1861
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Parkersburg, Virginia, in 1861 was a river town at the meeting of the Little Kanawha and the Ohio, and its economy rested on steamboat traffic, landings, and the goods moved between the river and the interior. A rail connection built in the 1850s tied the town to the wider East Coast trade, which made it one of the more commercially active places in the northwestern part of the state. That spring, Virginia's secession from the Union split the town's loyalties, and Parkersburg sat in a region where many residents opposed leaving the Union. Within a few years the area would become part of the new state of West Virginia, formed in 1863 during the Civil War. The map records a town on the eve of that upheaval, when its wharves, streets, and churches still reflected a peacetime river economy.
| Created / published | 1861 |
|---|---|
| Creator | moyer, james b., fowler, t. m. (thaddeus mortimer) |
| Notes | An original bird's-eye view map of Parkersburg, West Virginia, drawn in 1861. Bird's-eye view maps were drawn by travelling artists who walked a town street by street, sketching every building from an imagined vantage point in the air, then sold the finished lithograph door to door by subscription. Roughly five thousand American towns were recorded this way between the 1860s and the 1920s, and for many of them the panoramic map is the most complete picture of the place that survives. Reproduced from the original in the Library of Congress collections. Printed to order on archival paper. Free shipping on all US orders. |
| Subjects | Panoramic maps--West Virginia |
| Source | Library of Congress, Panoramic Maps |
| Original scan | 10,304 × 6,288 px · prints to 34 × 21 in at 300 dpi |
| Library of Congress title | Parkersburg, West Virginia 1899 |
| Reference | AMZ-SOTP-OYK-491503 |
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