Mapping Everytown

Imagine a map of New London that identifies the location and occupants of every building. Now expand that image to Merrimack County, to the state of New Hampshire, and finally to all the New England states. The task would require Google-sized resources today, but in the mid-1800s one man undertook that cartographic challenge.

New London Center (1858)

Henry F. Walling (1825-1888) produced around 150 maps, some on such a large scale that building footprints are represented (at a time before fire insurance maps made such views commonplace). A commercial endeavor, Walling’s maps were drawn and embellished in ways that might appeal to the broadest audience, and the fact that every property owner’s name appeared in print may have helped promote sales. While his success attracted competitors in larger markets down in Massachusetts and Connecticut, his wall maps of New Hampshire counties, with their inset engravings of landmarks and details of villages and town centers, were unrivaled.

Trained as a civil engineer, Walling apparently used a combination of earlier town maps, subcontracted surveys, and his own original field work. (On the Walden Pond portion of his Concord, MA, map, for example, he credited “surveys by H.D. Thoreau Civ. Engr.”) For practical reasons, Walling favored a compass and wheel odometer over the more traditional surveyor’s chain to plat town roads; his odometer was fast, accurate, and required just one man rather than a crew of three.

Walling also saw the artistry of his profession. In 1886, he concluded an address on topographical mapping with these remarks:

As the success of the portrait painter is measured by his skill in reproducing not only the more striking and familiar features of his subject, but a certain subtle, undefinable expression of individual character, so the topographer is a true artist who brings out upon his map not only the salient contours of the country, but the less apparent though real markings which reveal to experienced eyes the conflicts of the past between the great sculpturing forces of nature and the rugged resistances which have opposed them, the effective touches in either work of art being applied in the presence of the subject portrayed, with a true artistic sense of form and proportion.

Today you can find his large (5' x 5') 1858 map of New Hampshire’s Merrimack County at the Archives and displayed at several local businesses.


Sources:

• Buehler, Michael. “Henry F. Walling and the Mapping of New England’s Towns, 1849-1857” in The Portolan: Journal of the Washington Map Society, Spring 2008.
• Walling, Henry F. “Topographic Surveys of States” in the Journal of the Association of Engineering Societies, Vol. 5, 1886.