An 18th Century Survey of the Roads of the United States of America

A few short years after the United States won its independence, Christopher Colles set out to map the roads of the new republic. In 1789 he released the first three pages of what was to be a comprehensive and practical atlas, sold to subscribers who would pay in installments as new pages were completed. This atlas, a copy of which was owned, and likely used, by Chief Justice John Jay in his travels around the new nation, was titled A Survey of the Roads of the United States of America.

Colles had had a varied career on both sides of the Atlantic prior to beginning his Survey of the Roads. A native of Dublin, he had worked as a surveyor, engineer, and architect in Ireland; projects he worked on included inland navigation and the Custom House in Limerick, which still stands today despite a plot to blow it up in 1832. Upon immigrating to America in 1771, Colles did engineering work and gave public lectures. The George Washington papers contain a letter to Colles, dated January 1783, in which Washington perhaps reluctantly informed him of the impracticability of his scheme to remove navigational obstacles in the Ohio River.

Colles was described in a 1954 article by Lloyd Griffin as “one of the most universal jacks-of-all-trades in the whole realm of science in America.” As he advertised in a broadside titled Proposals for Publishing a Survey of the Roads of the United States of America, a copy of which is bound in with one of the two copies of the atlas held in the Library of Congress, the surveys were accomplished using a type of perambulator – also called a surveyor’s wheel – which Colles had invented himself. According to Walter Ristow in an article in The Quarterly Journal of the Library of Congress, vol. 36, no. 3 (Summer 1979), this “consisted of a series of cogwheels which recorded the number of revolutions of the wheel to which they were attached. The number of revolutions multiplied by the perimeter of the wheel gave a fair measure of the distance traversed.”

Colles had likely begun his surveys during the Revolutionary War; at this point he had left British-controlled New York City and spent several years moving around the upper Mid-Atlantic region. The plates showing areas south of Philadelphia were based on previous surveys done by others, including the surveyor general of the Continental Army, Simeon DeWitt.

Colles’s maps were intended primarily for travelers, and as such are an early precursor to later travel guides and modern GPS maps. Similarly, they were part of a tradition of itinerary and route maps extending back at least to Roman times. Perhaps the most notable example of the genre within roughly a century of Colles’s maps is John Ogilby’s Britannia, a series of large-format strip maps of the roads of England and Wales. Ogilby’s maps showed distances, hills, river and stream crossings, towns, notable residences, mills, churches, and crossroads.

A Survey of the Roads contained similar information. Each plate contains two or three strip maps, and each map shows about four miles of road. The title page contains a key, with symbols used to indicate Episcopal and Presbyterian churches, taverns, blacksmith shops, and other important buildings, along with bridges. The maps themselves show crossroads, some terrain and illustrated trees presumably indicating forest cover, and crossings of smaller streams. Colles also envisioned other uses of the maps: “Persons who have houses or plantations on the road may in case they want to let, lease, or sell the same, advertise in the public newspapers that the place is marked in such a page of Colles’s Survey of the roads; this will give so particular a description of its situation that no difficulty or doubt will remain about it.” His Proposals broadside was intentionally open-ended: “It is expected many other entertaining and useful purposes will be discovered when these surveys come into general use.”

“A traveller will here find so plain and circumstantial a description of the road, that whilst he has the draft with him it will be impossible for him to miss his way.”

Colles’s publication of the atlas was impeded by financial difficulties. He received a limited number of subscribers, and his petitions to the US government, despite a positive recommendation by the Postmaster General, went unfunded. The most complete extant editions of the Survey of the Roads contain only 83 plates; the initial advertisement to subscribers promised at least 100. Large areas of the country remained unsurveyed and unmapped by Colles, including New England, the west bank of the Hudson River, and everything south of Virginia. Colles moved on to canal planning projects in New England, and another geographical endeavor, the grandly-titled Geographical Ledger and Systemized Atlas Being an United Collection of Topographic Maps, Projected by One Universal Principle, and Laid Down by One Scale, Proposed To Be Extended To Different Countries As Materials Can Be Procured. By Christopher Colles of New York. This publication, too, went unfinished.

Learn more:

• Read Walter Ristow’s article Aborted American Atlases in the Quarterly Journal of the Library of Congress
• View other maps from the American Revolutionary period in our online collections