Maryland, Delaware & Southern New Jersey Map 1757 County Print - Annapolis, Dover, Chestertown

Engraved by Thomas Kitchin for the August 1757 issue of the London Magazine, this map of Maryland, the Delaware counties and the southern part of New Jersey was drawn directly from John Mitchell's landmark 1755 map of the British colonies and kept close to its scale. The London Magazine was one of the most widely read monthly periodicals in Georgian Britain, regularly running maps and essays to keep its readers abreast of the war then raging in America. Kitchin's engraving for the magazine trades the heavy ornament of a bound atlas plate for a crisper, more economical style suited to a periodical's smaller print run, yet still packs in a dense record of towns, counties, roads, rivers and bays. The sheet appeared alongside articles on the Six Nations of Indians, a Carolina fire and a destructive hurricane, giving readers a geographic companion to that month's colonial news, and it captures Maryland and Delaware in the middle of the French and Indian War.

Annapolis is marked as Maryland's seat of government on the western shore of the Chesapeake Bay, while across the bay Chestertown appears on the Eastern Shore, then a thriving tobacco port on the Chester River. Dover anchors the Delaware counties to the south, recorded here still under Pennsylvania's proprietary government though administered separately as the Three Lower Counties. The map traces the Susquehanna River as it empties into the head of the Chesapeake, and extends north to take in Philadelphia and the southern reaches of New Jersey, showing how tightly the Delaware Valley colonies were bound together by water and trade. Numerous smaller towns, roads and county lines fill out the Eastern Shore and the Delmarva peninsula.

This print makes a fitting gift for anyone with family history on Maryland's Eastern Shore, in the old Delaware counties, or the wider Chesapeake world, and it pairs well with the store's other 18th-century views of the region drawn from Bowen, Speed and Homann's surveys, each covering the Chesapeake at a different decade and from a different cartographic hand. Where those maps favor atlas-scale detail, this Kitchin plate captures the same coastline through the eyes of a contemporary London magazine reader following the war news. It is available unframed in a full range of sizes, from a compact print for a hallway to a large-format piece for a den or office.