Folks:
For the cartophiles among us, I highly recommend the new exhibition mounted at the New Jersey State Museum on State Street in Trenton with the above title. It opened this past Saturday and runs through 23 February 2014. I had to be there on opening day!
Due to my work, I am very familiar with the carto-bibliography of New Jersey and its localities, yet I examined several maps that were entirely new to me! Furthermore, I own originals of a number of the maps on exhibit, yet seeing them fully displayed, instead of rolled up and stored in my collection, reinvigorated my interest in some of those maps—and particularly the 1860 Kitchell and Hopkins topographical map of New Jersey. This is the map for which the state legislature withdrew funding at the last minute, so Kitchell decided to publish it on his own. The first state (edition) of the map did not feature Griffith Morgan Hopkins’s name and he complained bitterly to George H. Cook, the man who succeeded Kitchell as State Geologist. The folding version of this map on display in the exhibition is a later state that does feature Hopkins’s name. It is an extremely clean and clear copy of the map and Hopkins exerted great effort to represent virtually every house and building in the rural parts of the state. So, it is really great to examine areas in the Pines that had collections of structures juxtapositioned against those areas in which structures are noticeably absent.
Be aware that some of the description placards contain factual errors and/or an indication of historical ignorance on the part of those who mounted the exhibit. Nonetheless, just seeing the maps in one space—and all of them original and not color photocopies—was quite a thrill!
You should plan to spend between one and two hours in this exhibition of over 100 New Jersey maps drawn from the collections of the New Jersey State Museum, the New Jersey State Library, the New Jersey State Archives, and Rutgers, Special Collections. The display is spectacular and only diminished by the lack of a companion published catalog!
Best regards,
Jerseyman
For the cartophiles among us, I highly recommend the new exhibition mounted at the New Jersey State Museum on State Street in Trenton with the above title. It opened this past Saturday and runs through 23 February 2014. I had to be there on opening day!
Due to my work, I am very familiar with the carto-bibliography of New Jersey and its localities, yet I examined several maps that were entirely new to me! Furthermore, I own originals of a number of the maps on exhibit, yet seeing them fully displayed, instead of rolled up and stored in my collection, reinvigorated my interest in some of those maps—and particularly the 1860 Kitchell and Hopkins topographical map of New Jersey. This is the map for which the state legislature withdrew funding at the last minute, so Kitchell decided to publish it on his own. The first state (edition) of the map did not feature Griffith Morgan Hopkins’s name and he complained bitterly to George H. Cook, the man who succeeded Kitchell as State Geologist. The folding version of this map on display in the exhibition is a later state that does feature Hopkins’s name. It is an extremely clean and clear copy of the map and Hopkins exerted great effort to represent virtually every house and building in the rural parts of the state. So, it is really great to examine areas in the Pines that had collections of structures juxtapositioned against those areas in which structures are noticeably absent.
Be aware that some of the description placards contain factual errors and/or an indication of historical ignorance on the part of those who mounted the exhibit. Nonetheless, just seeing the maps in one space—and all of them original and not color photocopies—was quite a thrill!
You should plan to spend between one and two hours in this exhibition of over 100 New Jersey maps drawn from the collections of the New Jersey State Museum, the New Jersey State Library, the New Jersey State Archives, and Rutgers, Special Collections. The display is spectacular and only diminished by the lack of a companion published catalog!
Best regards,
Jerseyman
