Virginia, Maryland and Delaware in 1745 - Williamsburg, Annapolis, New Castle

Homann Heirs of Nuremberg published this map of eastern Virginia, Maryland, and all of Delaware in 1745, one of four regional maps of North America the firm issued together on a single sheet, all closely based on Herman Moll's earlier work in his Atlas Minor. Founded in 1702 by Johann Baptist Homann and carried on by his descendants after his death in 1724, the firm held a major place in the European map trade throughout the eighteenth century, translating English cartographic sources like Moll's into the German market with its own engraving conventions. This sheet focuses tightly on the Chesapeake Bay and its surrounding shores, giving unusually full treatment to Delaware alongside the more commonly mapped Virginia and Maryland. It captures the region in the decades before the French and Indian War, when the Chesapeake colonies were entering a period of steady growth built on tobacco exports and an expanding plantation economy, still years away from the imperial conflict that would reshape the colonial frontier further west.

Williamsburg appears as Virginia's capital, the role it had held since replacing Jamestown in 1699, now the political center of the colony's tobacco economy. Annapolis holds the same position for Maryland, a role it had formally carried since 1695 after the capital moved there from St. Mary's City. New Castle, on the Delaware River, was at this date the colony's principal town, predating Dover's later rise as the recognized capital and serving as the seat of Delaware's colonial government and courts. Moll's underlying survey, on which this German edition draws, gave the Chesapeake's rivers and shoreline a level of detail that made the map especially useful for tracking the bay's many tobacco-shipping points.

This 1745 Homann Heirs edition is a distinctive gift for a Virginia, Maryland, or Delaware family with colonial-era roots, a Chesapeake-region transplant, or a collector drawn to German engravings of English colonial sources. The store's earlier 1676 Speed-Lamb map covers much of the same Virginia-Maryland ground nearly seventy years earlier and from an English rather than German press, back when Jamestown and St. Mary's City, not Williamsburg and Annapolis, were each colony's seat of government; this later Homann sheet also adds the fuller Delaware coverage the Speed map lacks. It ships unframed and is available in a full range of sizes.