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THE FRENCHMAN'S MAP OF WILLIAMSBURG VIRGINIA
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THE FRENCHMAN'S MAP OF WILLIAMSBURG VIRGINIA
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by Michael J. Lombardi The Frenchman's Map. Courtesy of Special Collections Research Center, Swem Library, College of William and MaryThe Wythe House, the building labeled here, was French army headquarters.Only portions of the Peyton Randolph complex are drawn in.The handwriting, here French, elsewhere English, does not identify the mapmaker.Roughly outlined, the Governor's Palace and advances are on the map.On a dark January evening in 1927 the Reverend Dr. W. A. R. Goodwin led a troop of five men through the streets of a sleepy town whose days of glory were far in the past. Armed with an old sword, a surveyor's tape, and the tracings of an antique map, they set out to do battle with history. The sword served to stake down an end of the tape as Goodwin and his mates began measuring the streets of Williamsburg searching for the foundations of America's past. Their goal was the restoration of a colonial Virginia capital. A hand-drawn copy of the Frenchman's Map told them where to look. It is part of the lore of Colonial Williamsburg, The original Frenchman's Map, a detailed view of the streets and buildings of Williamsburg drawn near the end of the Revolutionary War, is easy to find today. It is preserved with the other priceless documents of American history in the rare books room at the College of William and Mary's Earl Greg Swem Library. The map with the intriguing name, discovered between the pages of an old book, helped uncover eighteenth-century Williamsburg, a treasure more valuable than anything marked by an X on a pirate's map. But the history of the map is as mysterious as any buccaneer's chart.After the Revolution, the map disappeared. It resurfaced more than a hundred years later in the hands of John D. Crimmins, a New York contractor and map collector. Crimmins's grandson said his grandfather had purchased a small library in Norfolk. The map was found in one of the volumes in 1909. When discovered, it was given to William and Mary, which owns it still. The college framed it neatly and hung it in the library, but not much notice was paid it. When Goodwin—a professor and fund-raiser for the college, as well as rector of Bruton Parish Church—began his quest to restore Williamsburg, he discovered the map, and recognized its importance to the restoration. He told his partner in the project, John D. Rockefeller Jr., in a January 1927 letter: We have found an old map at the College, of Williamsburg in 1782. This map locates every house in Williamsburg at that date. It is drawn to scale, and was drawn by a French military officer. It marks the Wythe House as General Headquarters. This map will be invaluable in our study.The map became the bible of the restoration. Or at least that is how Alan Simpson describes it in his little book The Mysteries of the "Frenchman's Map" of Williamsburg, Virginia. Simpson mostly solved the mysteries, and I've borrowed freely from him for this story. The map has been called "The Bible of the Restoration." Was it? Ed Chappell, the Richard and Shirley Roberts Director of Architectural Research at Colonial Williamsburg, thinks about that for a moment. He answers carefully. "It was useful to the restoration, and it has continued to be, for certain particular functions, useful. 'The bible' suggests the only source, and there are obviously many sources. One could never restore much of town simply with a map, however detailed that is. This is very detailed, like a lot of French military cartography. But it has limitations."The buildings and their locations are presented in a relatively precise manner, and they are to a scale to some degree, but it's a pretty small scale. And it's done in a somewhat impressionistic manner."At this point Chappell reaches over to pick up a copy of the map to remind him of those shortcomings. After a glance he continues. "Well, I guess an example would be the Peyton Randolph House, a good example of the kind of limitations of the map. It essentially ...
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