Fry, Joshua and Peter Jefferson

A Map of the Most Inhabited Part of Virginia; Containing the Whole Province of Maryland with Part of Pensilvania, New Jersey and North Carolina. London: Thomas Jefferys, ca. 1755



4 sheets joined together as one (49 x 31 in.; 1245 x 787). Map engraved by Thomas Jefferys, partially handcolored in outline, cartouche by Charles Grignion after Francis Hayman depicting a wharf scene with slaves crating tobacco into barrels;center fold strengthened with minor toning, lower right corner extended, left margin neatly strengthened. Floated on linen and glazed in a handsome frame.

Cumming, The Southeast in Early Maps, no.281; Pritchard & Taliaferro, Degrees of Latitude, no.30; Schwartz & Ehrenberg, Mapping of America, p.157-158; Coolie Verner, "The Fry and Jefferson Map" in Imago Mundi, 21 (1967), pp.74-94

The first printed map of Virginia by Virginians. Thomas Jefferson boasted in his autobiography that his father's collaboration wtih Joshua Fry produced the "first map of Virginia which has ever been made, that of Captain Smith being merely a conjectural sketch." Of the first state only two copies are recorded (at the New York Public Library and the Alderman Library of the University of Virginia) and states 2, 3, and 4 are also of extreme rarity. This very fine example represents Verner's 4th state.

Upon becoming president of the Board of Trade and Plantations in 1748, George Montagu Dunk, Earl of Halifax, solicited information from the colonies about activities on the frontiers. concern over French encroachments on territory claimed by Great Britain prompted the need for accurate maps, particuarly in the Ohio River Valley, where Virginia and Pennsyvlania claimed vast tracts of land. In 1750, Governor Lewis Burwell responded to Halifax's request by drawing upon two seasoned county surveyors, Colonel Joshua Fry and Peter Jefferson, to prepare a map of the Virginia colony.

In addition to their previous surveying work, Fry and Jefferson completed a border survey for the western bounds of the Northern Neck and for the boundary line between Virginia and North Carolina to prepare a draft of the map. Land masses in the Chesapeake region were more accurately rendered and the Virginia river system, essential to Virginia's tobacco trade, was delineated for the first time. Site surveying also made possible the correct depiction of the Appalachian Mountains on a northeast-southwest parallel. 

Fry and Jefferson's map dominated cartographical representations of Virginia until nearly the nineteenth century. Such was its detailed accuracy that it was used as a resource by John Mitchell and Lewis Evans to prepare their own maps of North America, which also appeared in 1755.