Virginia, Maryland & Carolina Map 1720 Regional Print - Williamsburg, Annapolis, Charleston

Johann Baptist Homann of Nuremberg published this map of Virginia, Maryland and Carolina around 1720, one of the best-known separately issued sheets from the publishing house he had founded in 1702, later carried on as Homann Heirs for well over a century. Homann held an imperial printing privilege from Charles VI, protecting his plates from copying and giving his maps unusually wide circulation across German-speaking Europe. This example is finished with an elaborate cartouche of Native American figures and colonial trade scenes, hand-colored in the workshop's characteristically bright wash rather than the muted outline tinting typical of English maps of the same period. The sheet covers the Chesapeake colonies of Virginia and Maryland together with Carolina to the south, at a moment when Palatine German immigration into these colonies was accelerating sharply, with new arrivals working as indentured redemptioners to pay off their Atlantic passage.

On the Virginia side, Homann marks Germantown, or Teutsche Statt, at the headwaters of the Rappahannock River, a settlement founded specifically to draw in the German-speaking migrants this map was designed to court. Williamsburg appears as Virginia's seat of colonial government, while Annapolis anchors Maryland across the Chesapeake Bay, itself richly detailed with coastal soundings and early river settlements. To the south, Charleston stands as Carolina's principal port, the colony not yet split into North and South. Further inland, the map records numerous early Carolina counties and native place names, and, curiously, a vastly oversized Lake Erie pushes the map's western edge toward Florida, while New Jersey is drawn divided into its historic East and West portions.

This print makes a distinctive gift for anyone with roots in the early Chesapeake or Carolina German-immigrant communities, or for a collector assembling Nuremberg views of colonial America. The store also carries Homann's later state of this same plate, printed around 1730 once his workshop had secured its full imperial privilege: that later issue adds privilege text to the cartouche, while this circa-1720 example represents the earlier, scarcer printing of the design. It is offered unframed and available in a full range of sizes, from a compact study print to a large-format statement piece for a study or family room wall.