Old Map of Lincolnshire in 1844 by Samuel Lewis - Boston, Grimsby, Spalding, Stamford, Louth

Few reference works of the early Victorian period were as ambitious as Samuel Lewis's Topographical Dictionary of England, a county-by-county gazetteer that ran through seven editions between 1831 and 1848, and this map of Lincolnshire was one of the county plans bound into its accompanying atlas. Lewis compiled his entries from correspondence sent in from parishes across the country, revising each new edition as vicars, schoolmasters and local officials wrote in with corrections, which makes the 1844 edition one of the more reliable in the series.

Lincolnshire, England's second-largest county, appears here still shaped by the great fen-drainage schemes of earlier centuries, its flat eastern lands given over to arable farming. Boston is marked on the Witham with the tower of St Botolph's Church, known locally as the Stump, rising over the town, while Grimsby appears on the Humber estuary shortly before it grew into one of the country's great fishing ports. Spalding sits amid the drained fen country to the south, Stamford is shown as the handsome stone town on the Great North Road that it remains today, and Louth appears below the Wolds as a long-standing market centre for the surrounding farmland.

Lewis paired each map with detailed notes on population, industry, churches and schools, so this sheet offers a snapshot of Lincolnshire exactly as a mid-nineteenth-century researcher would have consulted it, making it a welcome birthday or anniversary gift for anyone tracing Lincolnshire ancestry. Reproduced here unframed and at high resolution, it is available across our full range of sizes.